When Abylaikhan Assylbai was a child in the Zaysan district of East Qazaqstan, he grew up with the rhythm of metal and stories carried through generations. His father was a master craftsman; his grandfather on his mother’s side was a jeweler. Craft, beauty, the shaping of raw material into cultural memory, these were woven into the bones of his family. But his father died in the WWII when he was only five years old, leaving a silence in their home and a sense of unfinished apprenticeship in the boy who would one day carry the craft forward. He remembers himself sitting in the first desk at school, calm, quiet, observant. Books of the greatest Qazaq philosophers and writers became his early companions. He studied agronomy at a technical college in Talgar, hoping perhaps that working with the earth could bring something steady to his life. He worked in gardening for a time, but his hands always reached for creation. Even before disability entered his life, he would braid qamshy and build wooden sandyq with patience and pride. “Since childhood I was drawn to art, although no one taught me this, it was in my blood. I was following the call of my Father” he says. In the mid of 80s Abylaikhan could not but join Qazaq youth in Zheltoksan riots against Moscow’s decision on a new ruler of Qazaqstan. Youth was oppressed heavily by the Soviet regime but they didn’t give up.

Then came 1997. He climbed high for a day’s work, up a crane, and fell. A fracture tore through his thoracic spine, severing sensation below the waist. He lay in bed for three long years. Days stretched into nights without movement, without certainty, without the guarantee of standing again. The world narrowed to the dimensions of a hospital room. His athletic body was now a cage. “I was bedridden,” he recalls. “Since then, 28 years have passed.” What kept him alive was not just medicine, it was imagination. One day, while lying there fighting loneliness and fear, he saw a master craftsman on television: Darkembai Shokparuly, a legendary figure in traditional Qazaq armor, handcraft and artistry. Something inside Abylaikhan stirred. A seed. A promise. A reminder of the hands he inherited from ancestors who had shaped beauty for the nation. Three years later, when he was finally able to move a little, he traveled to Almaty, a difficult journey with a broken body but an unbroken spirit, and became Darkembai’s student. “I lived with him and learned from his experience,” he says. For six years they worked side by side. In that workshop, he re-learned life. He re-learned his place in the world. He re-learned that creation was not just craft: it was dignity. He learnt that it was a commitment of every craftsman to develop Qazaq craftsmanship and art and teach at least 10 more apprentices. Only then the Qazaq art would strive. He walked then with a cane, knowing that each step cost him more than others could see. A wheelchair felt “inconvenient,” he says politely, but really, it symbolized the boundaries he refused to accept. He chose movement, even if it was painful, because choosing movement meant choosing life.

Eventually, he went to Semey, Abai’s homeland, where he has lived since 1996. He built a small private workshop, only large enough for one body to move slowly between tools. In winter, the living room becomes his workspace. On the walls and tables: bes qaru shields, shokpar clubs, axes, chain mail glinting like the armor of ancestors rising into the future. He specializes in kireuke sauyt, chain mail armor. Each requires 35,000 tiny steel rings, woven one into another like the interlocking resilience of a nation. Patience, precision, devotion, that is the currency of his days. “Other masters say, ‘No, there will not be enough patience.’” But he has enough for a lifetime. His teacher once told him: “If you want to have fewer rivals in art … choose the most difficult path.” So he did. And he continues. Now 62, he works from nine in the morning until ten at night. He performs namaz throughout the day. He exercises from a chair because he cannot feel his legs, squats, stretches, gymnastics for the body that refuses to quit. “I just want to work,” he says. “I don’t need rest.” He keeps a cane beside him like a loyal companion. Behind it, three heart attacks survived with sheer will. “Death comes suddenly,” he reflects, “so I want to leave a mark, a legacy.” That word, legacy, is what drives him. He dreams that his children will inherit not only his blood, but his craft and his pride.

His achievements are many: Grand Prix awards from Samgau, Zhanshuak, Souvenir of the East. The gold award from Keruen of Kindness, where they honored his generosity, gifting armor to his teacher and even to his hometown museum. In 2017, he was invited to Astana to meet the President. Appreciating his talent, virtue and contribution to the development of the Qazaq craftsmanship the local community elected him as a Chair of Alqa Biiler (a council of sages).

This is the reality he lives in, a system where acknowledgement comes cheaply, but accessibility and inclusion cost more than authorities are willing to pay. He once received a space from the akimat for a workshop, but it was far away and unreachable by his cane. He received a grant from Damu, 500,000 tenge,and bought large tools that now gather dust because his workspace cannot fit them. “For about ten years now, they’ve just been standing there unused,” he says, quietly exposing a policy failure without bitterness. He won 1 million tenge recently for being the only person in Qazaqstan to have woven the greatest number of chain mails. Yet still, there is no adequate workshop where students can sit beside him and learn. He asks, leaders nod, leaders change, and nothing happens. His workshop waits. His tools wait. His dream waits. And still, he creates. He has faced humiliation too, especially in early days.

Abai would call this jurek (heart), a heart that refuses to shrink. His spirituality deepened after the accident. He constantly read Abai during those years of bedridden stillness. He quotes Abai easily:

He doesn’t stop reading Qara Sozder (Abai’s Book of Words), Auezov, Muqagali, Alikhan Bokeikhan, Magzhan Zhumabayev, Shakarim. “Abai’s path is the path to perfection,” he says. “There are no incorrigible people.” He continues, “My master cited to me Al Farabi that knowledge without upbringing could become evil. A man has to have 70 virtues in order to find their place in society. This requires studying and learning constantly and hard”. Abylikhan stresses that thanks to his parents upbringing he became what he is today - resilient, honest, industrious and talented. His legacy was woven into armours of warriors once donated and now displayed in various museums including in Zaisan, his fatherland. He carries Abai’s philosophy not as literature, but as a compass. He disciplines his morning, trains his will, refuses selfpity. He believes in aqyl (mind), thinking critically, learning constantly. He believes in qairat (will), the force that lifts a man back into life. He believes in jurek (heart), choosing honor even when society looks down. When he fell, his sister Karima stood beside him like a guardian sent from God. She turned her garage into a workshop and continues supporting him. His wife, too, stood through every frightening night. She worked as a massage therapist and prayed with him for hope, and their daughter was born. “A good deed is the fruit of your purity,” he says. Family held him together until he learned to hold himself.

He has no pension savings, a consequence of bureaucracy forgetting his existence at the exact moment he needed protection. The enterprise never recorded his accident properly; therefore, he cannot access certain medicines or rehabilitation centers even now. “They say there is attention to art,” he adds softly, “but the allocated funds often do not reach the masters.” Still, he keeps dreaming. “I want to sew armor for films,” he says with a spark in his voice. “And for my children, so they can earn and continue my work.” He wants to train ten students as his teacher once demanded of him. He wants his art to continue in hands that have not yet learned patience or pride. He wants to teach to craft with high spirits, as pieces of any craftsman would continue to live for decades after leaving the workshop. Sometimes he visits a school for children with disabilities. He sees fear in them, fear that society will not accept them. So he speaks truth into their insecurity:

He says it with conviction, because he lived it. He refuses regret. “Everyone should do what they do best,” he says. He once refused even a two-room apartment offered in exchange for opening a shop, he did not want wealth he didn’t earn by his own labor. His craft is his integrity, thread by thread, ring by ring

His aqyl (mind) continues learning. His zhurek (heart) continues believing. His qairat (will) continues working. Every ring of chain mail he connects is an act of rewriting the narrative Qazaqstan once imposed on disability. Every weapon he crafts tells the narrative of a people who endure. Every hour he spends shaping metal is a testament to the truth he lives: A person does not break unless they choose to. Following the words of Magzhan Zhumabayev “Men zhastarga senemin” (I believe in youth) he sees great importance in mentoring young generations to be more resilient, educated, to love its people and the Qazaq language, promote and speak in the Qazaq language. He dreams to pour his experience and wisdom on pages of a book that would guide young generations of craftsmen. He has climbed back onto life’s heights, not with legs that failed him, but with hands that never did. And now, as he moves forward with breath measured by heart that has stopped three times yet continues beating. He took his challenge and goes on every day He knows that legacy is not counted in money or buildings: It is counted in persistence. It is counted in culture and art kept alive. It is counted in the students who will follow. It is counted in the armor of the spirit he wears daily. Abylaikhan Assylbai has already woven more than chain mail. He has woven himself whole.

Adilet’s narrative answers Abai’s warning in the Third Word about idleness, moral decay, and the loss of collective integrity. In a society where shortcuts and dependency too often replace discipline and honor, Adilet builds with precision, effort, and ethical clarity. Living with a lifelong disability, he transforms limitation into leadership by creating one of Qazaqstan’s most respected food-serviceand IT enterprises. Guided by Abai’s triad of mind, heart and will, he restores the dignity of work and the virtue of accountability. Refusing pity and corruption alike, Adilet grounds his success in order, fairness, and service, embodying Abai’s call for educated, principled, and industrious citizens who lead by example rather than ambition.

Born and raised in Qazaqstan, a society still echoing with Soviet-era notions of disability as defect, Adilet Zakiyev grew up with a congenital disability. Yet from the outset, he regarded it not as a barrier, but as a given. “It’s just there,” he says. “It limits me in some ways, but it doesn’t define my choices.” In a cultural environment where institutional and social norms often reinforce dependency and passivity for individuals with disabilities, Adilet charted a different course.

His early life was shaped by dual identities: the limitations of his body and the vast potential of his mind. A trained IT specialist, he never imagined himself in food service, yet this is precisely where he would plant the seeds of a business empire. “I didn’t know much about food service,” he recalls. “But I had a vision, and I just started.”

The motivation to start his first venture came not from external encouragement but from internal dissonance, a lack, a yearning. “I opened a place to fulfill my own unmet need,” Adilet reflects. During his studies in Europe, he fell in love with a type of cuisine that was poorly represented back home. So he took a risk, entering an industry in which he had no prior experience. It was a leap of faith, a response to the silence around him.

There was no roadmap, no mentor. But Adilet knew hunger, not just literal hunger for better food, but the existential hunger for relevance, creation, and contribution. In a context where individuals with disabilities are often nudged toward passive state support or symbolic employment, his move was radically self-directed. “Maybe I was lucky,” he says humbly, “but it worked.”

As his venture grew, so did the complexity of leadership. And here, Adilet’s inner triad, mind, heart and will, came into motion. He began waking up before sunrise, training physically five times a week, and immersing himself in operational details. “Discipline became my default,” he explains. “Sport in the morning, work till evening. Weekends with family. That’s my rhythm.”

Abai’s wisdom echoes here: “aqyl, qairat, zhurekti birdei usta” — hold aqyl (mind), jurek (heart) and qairat (will) together. Adilet exemplifies this harmony. His mind systematized business processes through IT automation. His heart remained with his family and his employees. And his will, sharpened through years of stress, betrayals, and responsibility, held it all together.

Even when employees stole from him or state audits loomed, Adilet refused to collapse inward. “Any situation is resolvable,” he says. “It’s just a matter of cost, emotional, energetic, or financial.”

Over time, Adilet built more than a restaurant, he built a system. Today, he employs over 200 people with an annual turnover exceeding 1.5 billion KZT. He also co-leads an IT startup that optimizes food service operations. “I’m a perfectionist,” he admits, “but that helps; we built tech that solved our own problems.”

In doing so, he redefined what competence looks like for entrepreneurs with disabilities in Qazaqstan. No longer framed as a person “in need” or “at risk,” Adilet became a creator of jobs, an innovator, and a community builder. His disability never disappeared, but it was now part of a narrative about capacity.

What changed, most profoundly, was not the world around him, but how he saw himself within it. Entrepreneurship brought success, but also physical strain and emotional fatigue. “Health? I can’t say it improved,” he admits. “I’ve become more tolerant of stress. But the body does get worn down.” Despite rigorous training and clean living,the emotional weight of constant vigilance and responsibility takes its toll.

He reflects on burnout not as collapse, but as the natural ebb and flow of longterm commitment. “You can’t always be on fire,” he says. “Discipline is more important than enthusiasm.” His philosophy mirrors Abai’s deeper understanding of life as a moral and spiritual journey, not just productivity, but becoming

Adilet’s journey is not a solitary ascent. His leadership is deeply communal. He credits his wife, his team, and his longtime partners as co-pilots in his journey. “We have shared roles. If I disappear, nothing collapses,” he notes with quiet confidence. He refuses to accept state-sponsored programs for people with disabilities, not out of pride, but out of conviction. “I don’t want special treatment. If we are truly equal, treat us as such.” He is skeptical of how poorly designed programs open doors for corruption or surveillance rather than support. Still, he envisions a system where real mentorship, education, and dignified capital access can allow others like him to flourish.

As a former advisor to the Ministry of Labor on disability inclusion, he carries not just his own narrative but the responsibility to shift narratives for others. Adilet’s narrative is not about triumph over adversity, it’s about the quiet, relentless work of building inner and outer order. In a culture that often frames disability through pity or heroism, Adilet offers something far more radical: normalcy with discipline, wholeness through harmony.

Even his concept of success has shifted:

By forging normalcy through disciplined vision and genuine care, Adilet embodies the Tolyq Adam ideal, proving that disability is neither defect nor excuse but part of a larger journey of self‑becoming.

Where Abai warns that satiety can make a person indifferent, Aigul continuously reawakens gratitude, finding joy not in having more but in helping more. When her illness forced her to pause, she did not sink into despair or tire of life as Abai feared; instead, she found renewed clarity: she must recover not for vanity but “for the children, for my husband, for my mother.” The instability of worldly comforts did not embitter her; it purified her priorities. Her dreams, to teach others, to hire differently-abled youth like her son, to feed children quality food, resist the restless desire for more that Abai cautions against. She anchors herself in what endures beyond earthly excess: mind, heart and will working in harmony.

Aigul Imanserikova’s path began far from the polished counters of her presentday café. She grew up in Almaty as an only child, her mother working double shifts, one week leaving before sunrise, the next coming home long after dark. Silence filled the apartment, and a young girl learned self-reliance. Her mother would explain a recipe in a rush before running to work; Aigul would test it alone, carefully watching dough rise in a small oven, trying not to burn the cakes. At fourteen, she stood over a waffle maker, inhaling the scent of warm sugar and discovering that baking gave her a quiet sense of joy. Her academic path followed the respectable script expected of highachieving Qazaq girls, finance, a red diploma, a stable job at Halyk Bank. She married, had two healthy children, built a life that looked secure and familiar. Nothing suggested that she would one day run a business employing twelve people while navigating the daily reality of caring for a child with cerebral palsy, and later, her own cancer diagnosis.

Everything changed in 2011, when her third child was born. Something felt wrong from the beginning. “By four months, my older two were already turning over,” she says. “He couldn’t even hold his head.” Doctors dismissed her concerns, but her jurek (heart), a mother’s knowing heart, refused to be comforted by empty reassurances. He didn’t follow toys with his eyes or respond to her voice. Finally, at one year and two months, the diagnosis arrived: cerebral palsy. The identity she had built as a bank professional dissolved in an instant. Even the offer of three years’ maternity leave felt meaningless, her son would need much longer. For five years, her life became a relentless routine of physical therapy, speech therapy, and trips to hospitals. She searched nights online, looking for treatment options abroad, writing messages to strangers. When a sponsor covered their first trip to China, 15,000 dollars, she saw results. “After that first trip, he began to walk,” she recalls softly. “There were real results. How could I stop?”

During those years, money was tight. Her husband became the sole breadwinner while therapy costs multiplied. Still, her resolve stayed firm: “I told myself: my life is already lived. His is just beginning. I must do everything so that he can at least say, ‘I’m thirsty,’ when I’m not near.” When her son was finally strong enough to attend kindergarten at five, Aigul suddenly found a few hours of silence each day. Into that quiet stepped her childhood hobby, baking, now carrying an adult purpose. Her eldest daughter won a mixer in a raffle, and a classmate invited Aigul to a cupcake masterclass. “I thought I would just learn something for the kids,” she smiles. Instead, she found herself surrounded by women already running small businesses. The spark caught fire

She started with simple orders in her home kitchen, neighbors buying pies “just to support her,” she jokes. But each order nurtured her qairat (will). She woke at three in the morning to ensure cakes were ready by eight. “If I promise, I must deliver,” she says. Fear sat quietly beside her, fear of disappointing customers, fear of never earning enough, but she kept going. Her mother, shaped by Soviet expectations, worried: “You have a finance degree. Why tire yourself at night? Find a normal job.” But Aigul had glimpsed a life in which she could earn income and be present for therapy sessions, school pickups, and doctor visits. “I realized this is my thing,” she says simply. “I enjoyed it too much to go back to an office.” By 2019, her home bakery gained recognition. The Auezov district akimat offered her a free room, but on one condition: she would teach other mothers. That room became more than a workspace; it became a refuge for single mothers, large families, and parents of children with disabilities. They baked, but they also shared burdens, finding winter coats for each other’s children, making sure no one left feeling alone. “It wasn’t just about baking,” Aigul says. “We all needed human connection.” Then the pandemic forced the room to close. Instead of collapse, demand increased, people stayed home and ordered baked goods. Her father-in-law saw how she was running herself ragged and built a 40-square-meter workshop in their yard. The business became inseparable from family life. Children passed plates through the workshop door, helped measure flour, and reminded her to rest. “My business became my fifth child,” she laughs, a living thing she nurtured alongside her four children. Her next leap required aqyl (mind). In 2023, she heard about a concessional loan program for parents of children with disabilities. After careful planning, she borrowed 32 million tenge to buy professional equipment and open a café. Her mother sold an apartment to buy her a small commercial space: “It’s old and lower district,” Aigul says, “but it’s ours.” That word, ours, carries security no salary ever gave her.

The café expanded beyond desserts, offering healthy meals for busy mothers and semi-prepared food for families. Today she manages two production spaces, a café, and a team of twelve. The business is still a family ecosystem: her son with cerebral palsy now works part-time assembling boxes, practicing motor skills while earning his first wages. Her daughters help with packing and deliveries. “Everyone works,” she says. “No one just sits on a phone.” Aigul holds tight to a principle that echoes Abai’s Words: true distinction comes from conscience, reason, and goodness, not wealth or display. “Our products have always been natural. I’d rather sell less but sleep peacefully.” She refuses artificial additives and kindly redirects parents wanting neon-colored cakes: “My own children eat this. It must be good.” In February 2024, another shock arrived. A routine surgery revealed cancer. “I planned to return in three days,” she says. Instead, she received a diagnosis requiring chemotherapy and disability status, this time for herself. Her husband cried: “What will I do without you?” She answered calmly, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to die. We will fight this.” When her hair fell out, her youngest son searched the internet for cures, bringing her blankets and socks, trying to protect the mother who had always protected him. Chemotherapy forced her to release control. Her family, and team, ran the business while she was in the hospital. It survived. “For the first time I realized I can delegate,” she admits. Her mind, heart, and will, aqyl (mind), zhurek (heart), qairat (will), began to align in a healthier balance. She learned to lead without burning her own flame down to the wick.

Still, systemic barriers remain sharp. Therapy is expensive. School options for children with disabilities are limited to trades that do not suit her son. “We must grow the business so he will have work,” she insisted to her husband. After meeting a young entrepreneur in Astana who hires baristas with Down syndrome, she started dreaming of a café where her son could one day prepare coffee for regulars, inclusion not as charity, but as dignity. Support has arrived in pieces, a free room to teach mothers, two equipment grants, the concessional loan, the MAMA PRO project where she updated digital skills and wrote her first business plan. But the real safety net has been people: her husband, her mother, other mothers she once taught. Women call her daily: “How to open a company? Where to find boxes?” She answers everyone. “It’s nice when you’ve already walked this path and can help someone else avoid mistakes.” Yet she is honest: guilt is a companion. Some nights she comes home exhausted, worried she has not given enough love or attention. Her eldest daughter grew up too fast, helping feed siblings while Aigul baked through the night. “Women without children can focus on business,” she says. “We must always switch between everything.” But motherhood was always the source, the motive, the reason the business exists at all. Asked what success means, she does not mention profits. She tells a story of a woman she admires, a single mother who built a cafeteria and now pays for an employee’s child with disabilities to receive treatment.

Her short-term goal: pay off the loan. Her long-term vision: multiple cafés, a steady future for her children, and a place for her son to work proudly. Above all: speech and strength for him, health and happiness for all four. Aigul’s life reflects Abai’s ideal of the complete human, where ‘mind’ guides, ‘heart’ humanizes, and ‘will’ sustains. From a lonely girl baking in a cramped kitchen, to a mother believing for her son’s first steps, to a woman rising after cancer to keep her fifth “child” alive, she rebuilds herself again and again with quiet courage. Her only supporter in these challenges was her mother, who believed in her and her ideas. She has not merely opened a café. She has created a world where resilience is baked into the dough and inclusion is served without being named. A world where success tastes like dignity, and smells faintly of warm sugar.

She names the problem exactly as Abai does, bureaucratic indifference, shallow “consultations,” and a culture that nudges the vulnerable toward dependency, and then rebuilds different conditions: planning, transparency, and capability. Abai asks, “Who is strong enough to uproot this evil?” Aizada’s answer is practical rather than rhetorical: build capability, teach others, and create lawful opportunities so people can “earn what they lack” without collusion. Her dream is to take financial literacy and business-planning workshops to rural districts, and even to pioneer intimate coaching for women with disabilities. Aizada lives in the moral economy Abai longed for: one where conscience guides action, work is honest, learning is continuous, and the ordinary person has a clean, dignified way to thrive.

When Aizada Yerbolkyzy speaks, her words flow with quiet fire, not the rage of bitterness, but the power of survival that has burned through pain, loss, and rebirth. Born and raised in Almaty, she grew up with a love for learning and numbers. She graduated from the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Abai Kazakh National Pedagogical University in 2015 with a degree in Information Systems, a proud moment for her and her family. Life seemed steady and hopeful. She was married, had a young daughter, and carried the aspirations of an ordinary Qazaq woman building a modest but meaningful life. Then, in late 2017, everything changed. A car accident left her spine shattered. “I broke my back,” she said, “and after that, I couldn’t feel my body below the waist.” The diagnosis came with the weight of finality, first-degree disability. She spent nearly three years bedridden, dependent on others even for the smallest movement. She remembers lying in bed, feeding through a tube, watching her little daughter take her first steps. “I was lying there,” she recalled softly, “and my daughter was walking, learning, growing. I was learning to crawl again.”

Her husband could not bear the weight of her condition. One day, he left. “He abandoned me,” she said. “After that, I moved back to my parents’ home.” The days blurred into years, pain, treatments, rejection. Even the doctors stopped taking her case seriously, dismissing her despite her willingness to pay for care. Yet one moment changed everything: her imagination of her daughter’s voice, not as a child, but as a grown woman filled with hurt. “In my mind,” she said, “I saw my daughter telling me: ‘Mom, you sat there your whole life. Dad left us. I never saw anything, never went anywhere, never wore what I wanted.’” That imagined future pierced her heart. “That vision gave me ruh (from Qazaq ‘spirit’),” she said. “It gave me strength. I realized I could not stay like this. My daughter was growing, and I had to act.” That day, Aizada decided to stand, not on her feet, but in her will. Standing meant accepting her condition, facing the world, and returning to society. In 2021, she moved to the city, renting a small apartment in Almaty. She tried finding jobs, but her health made office work impossible. “I couldn’t sit long,” she said. “The pain would become unbearable, and the salary wasn’t even enough to cover transport.” So she turned to the online world, searching for something that could bring both dignity and income.

Her journey into entrepreneurship began, as she puts it, “out of pride and necessity.” “I had higher education, I had a daughter, I had been married,” she said. “I didn’t want to do low-paid work just to survive. I wanted something I could be proud of.” Beneath her determination burned an inner contest, at first, an eregec, a defiance born of pain. “Outwardly, it looked like I was trying to prove something to my ex-husband,” she said, “but in truth, I was proving it to myself.” That fire carried her toward her first major leap, applying for a government grant for socially vulnerable groups. In 2021, she heard about the 400 MRP grant and decided to apply. “It was meant to help people like us … to give us a start instead of just waiting for help,” she said. But the grant was small, and she knew she had to go further. Around that time, scrolling through social media, she came across a business coach from Astana offering a course to train participants to write business plans and apply for a 5,000,000 tenge grant. The course cost 125,000 tenge, an enormous amount for her. “My father had only 10,000 saved for me,” she recalled. “I sent them 5,000 as a prepayment and my disability certificate. I told them I would pay the rest in installments. That’s how I took the leap. I trusted Allah first … then myself.” That decision transformed her life. She not only completed the course but became one of the top students, and soon after, the assistant to her mentor. “Because it was online, no one knew I was disabled,” she said proudly. “I was the first in the team to be hired, and I became the teacher’s right hand.” Her hard work and intellect brought her recognition, and in November 2021, she won the 5,000,000 tenge grant, becoming one of Qazaqstan’s first entrepreneurs to open a sock manufacturing workshop, as a person with a first-degree disability.

Today, Aizada manages three organizations under her name, an individual entrepreneur, a limited liability company, and a public foundation. She also works as an expert-trainer at the Ten Qogam center in Almaty, teaching people with disabilities how to start businesses and apply for grants. “For three years, I’ve been giving consultations,” she said. “When my clients go to apply, their documents are always perfect from the first time.” Her pride lies not only in her business success but in her contribution to others’ empowerment. “I teach because I love to teach,” she smiled. “When I explain something, I don’t feel tired. It gives me energy.” Yet her days are not easy. She manages both online and offline teams, balancing strategy, client meetings, and mentorship. “If one thing moves, everything moves,” she laughed. “So I plan my week strictly.” But beneath her cheerful tone lies the reality of physical strain. “I walk with crutches,” she said. “They told me to use a wheelchair, but I refused. If I sit, I’ll get used to comfort. So I walk … even if it’s hard.” Her resilience radiates in her philosophy of balance. “When I’m tired,” she said, “I rest fully. I don’t feel guilty. I can sleep the whole day if I need to.” She also shares her emotions openly with her followers, speaking on live streams about challenges, health, and mental strength. “I don’t hold it in,” she said. “If I need to cry, I cry. Then I move on.”

The barriers she faces are not only physical but social. “Once, in Burabay, people saw me walking with crutches and whispered, ‘She’s so young, why is she walking like that?’” she said. “They don’t understand. But I still dress beautifully, wear makeup, and go out. I’m not ashamed.” For her, self-presentation is an act of defiance, a declaration that disability is not invisibility. What angers her most, though, is bureaucracy and indifference. “The people who are supposed to help don’t give proper consultations,” she said. “They get paid whether they help or not.” So she took it upon herself to learn every regulation, every law, and every funding rule. “That’s why I became an expert,” she explained. “Because I studied everything by myself. My clients succeed because I understand how the system works.” Aizada often reflects on who she was before the accident, a quiet, soft-spoken woman with low self-esteem. “Before, I never spoke up,” she said. “I was shy, silent, always saying yes. But this accident made me strong.” The pain, the abandonment, the struggle, they all forged her into a new person. “I used to imagine myself speaking in front of millions,” she said. “Now I do. I appear on TV, I speak at forums.” Her confidence, once buried, has become her signature. One of her most vivid memories is the day her old laptop broke, twice, just as she began studying. “I cried so hard,” she said. “I thought I’d lost everything … my lessons, my notes, all my information.” But later she remembered a saying that she now lives by: ‘When you decide to change, Allah will test you with difficulties. The strong ones keep going.’ Her repairman stayed up all night to save her files, a small miracle that she still recalls with gratitude.

When asked if she regrets anything, she smiles. “Not at all,” she said. “If this hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be who I am today. I even thank my ex-husband for leaving me. If he’d stayed, I would have lived in comfort and never changed.” She believes that life gives hints, small, gentle warnings, before it sends a blow strong enough to awaken us. “People who’ve experienced trauma rise faster,” she said. “Because they have nothing left to fear.” Her message to others with disabilities is sharp and loving: “Don’t be victims. Stop crying. Crying won’t help.” She believes too many people stay in comfort zones, waiting for life to change. “Some say, ‘I’ll walk first, then I’ll work,’ but what if that day never comes?” she asked. “You have to move. Crawl if you must, but move.” For Aizada, faith and purpose are intertwined. “Everything belongs to Allah,” she said. “We won’t take anything with us. So live. Work. Learn.” Her motivation is clear, her daughter. “I want to give her education, a home, a car. That’s why I keep going,” she said. In the future, she dreams of creating a new kind of business, intimate coaching for women with disabilities, helping them talk openly about relationships, self-image, and family life. “They often ask me to become an intimate trainer,” she laughed. “No one talks about these things, but they need to be said. Maybe I’ll be the first.” She also plans to bring financial literacy workshops to rural regions, where she hopes to teach others how to apply for grants and start businesses of their own. “It’s all about learning and communication,” she said. At the end of our conversation, Aizada leaned back and said, almost like a confession:

Her narrative embodies mind, heart, and will, the full harmony of Abai’s Tolyq Adam. The intellect to learn and adapt, the heart to forgive and love again, and the will to rise when life seems impossible. Through every tear and triumph, Aizada shows what it means not just to live, but to live fully, fiercely, and without fear.

She continues learning, traveling to masterclasses in Almaty, joining artistic associations, exploring new techniques, and passing her skills to others. Her work is not driven by profit alone; it is guided by purpose: inspiring children, mothers, and other women to believe in their abilities, and preserving cultural memory through handmade Qazaq crafts. When she says, “I am a happy person… because I found a calling I love,” she embodies Abai’s message that a meaningful life eliminates the fear of future regret. Aizhan Azimbayeva’s narrative proves that wisdom is not abstract, it is lived through small daily acts of courage, care, and creativity. She is crafting not just wool, but a life strengthened by aqyl (mind), warmed by jurek (heart), and sustained by qairat (will) a life Abai would describe as truly human, and one that she, too, will look back on with pride.

Aizhan grew up in Shymkent in a family where qolöner ( in Qazaq translates to “handcraft” or “handmade art”) was simply part of everyday life. Her mother sewed; at relatives’ homes she watched carpets being woven on a huge loom, listened to Qazaq melodies playing from a small Soviet radio, and heard the dombra being played in the evenings. As a little girl of four or five she did not know the word “heritage,” but she was already absorbing its sounds and textures. Later she would say, “I touched everything, I watched everything, and only now I realise how much it shaped me.” Those early images of woven carpets, mother’s hands, and Qazaq songs sank quietly into her jurek (heart) and waited there. As a young woman she followed that thread almost instinctively. She became a dressmaker and pattern designer, working in sewing factories and ateliers. The work was technically demanding but familiar: measuring, cutting, fitting, always one more client to help. At twenty, in a shearling coat factory, she could not bear to see beautiful offcuts of material thrown away. While the cutter swept them into the bin, she secretly gathered pieces into a bag, took them home, and stitched together her first jacket from what others called “waste.” Already her aqyl (mind) was searching for possibility where others saw nothing, and her qairat (will) refused to let good material be discarded.

Somewhere along the way there was a car accident. She speaks about it briefly, almost shyly, as if the pain is old but still tender. For a long time she did not even apply for disability status. She just tried to live as before, pushing her body to keep up with the pace of atelier work, standing, lifting, fitting, rushing to serve one urgent client after another. But the consequences of the accident slowly tightened around her life. Moving became harder. Long hours of sitting and straining over fine stitches damaged her eyesight. The emotional intensity of working with customers all day began to exhaust her.

Yet even in that pressure, something new was forming. One day, scrolling through Instagram, she saw a vest made of felt. Something in her responded immediately. She took a screenshot and kept looking at it until the image almost burned into her mind. “I was sick with it,” she laughs. “I burned with the desire to learn how to make that vest.” This was more than curiosity; it felt like a calling, mind seeing a new path, heart leaping toward it, and her will quietly preparing to move. At the time she was sewing traditional Qazaq outfits for rent in an atelier, working with velvet, embroidery and headpieces. The work was already closer to what stirred her soul, yet she still felt pushed by life toward something she could not yet name. When one of her colleagues was sent to a big exhibition in Turkestan, Aizhan offered to deliver some of her things and pay her own way, simply because something in her insisted she should go. “Sometimes miracles happen,” she says. “This was one of them.” In the hotel room she stepped into a small universe of felt art: vests, bags, and garments with that living texture she had seen on the screen. The first thing she recognised was a handbag by Gulmira Ualikhan, creator of the “Qazaqsha Quraq” course she followed online. Seeing that familiar design in real life, she grabbed it with both hands, overwhelmed. Only then did she notice a woman lying calmly on the bed, reading. While Aizhan was bubbling with excitement, the woman remained serene.

That woman was Ulbolsyn Daulenova, a renowned felting artist from Almaty, and, as it turned out, the author of the very vest Aizhan had been dreaming about. When Ulbolsyn glanced at the screenshot and said calmly, “That’s my vest,” Aizhan felt the world tilt. “When you really, truly want something,” she says, “it comes to meet you.” At that moment, her desire met its teacher. She did not hesitate. “I’ll come even as an apprentice,” she told Ulbolsyn. “I’ll do anything you say, I just want to learn.” Ulbolsyn smiled and replied that apprenticeship was even better than paid lessons, because an apprentice learns with jurek (heart), not just with money. For Aizhan, those words were like a breath of fresh air after years of suffocating routine.

Soon afterward, a large international felting festival opened in Almaty, the first of its kind in Qazaqstan. Masters from Hungary, Turkey, the US and across the country gathered to exhibit their work. On 13 November 2022, pushed by her own fierce desire, Aizhan left her comfort zone and travelled to Almaty. She describes the experience as stepping into a current of pure creative energy: jewelers, potters, quilters, felt-makers, all showing garments and artworks that seemed to hum with life. She took master classes during the festival, then went to study directly with Ulbolsyn, learning her author’s technique step by step. A year later, back in Shymkent, she made her first felt vest, the one she had dreamed of. Then three, then four more. From there the line of her creativity flowed outward: dolls, slippers, tubeteika, large tekemet

In her home workshop she discovered a different rhythm. She could wake up, step straight into her creative space, and work the whole day without feeling tired. “It doesn’t exhaust me; it gives me energy,” she explains. When orders are urgent, she can quickly produce twenty-three gifts for a Textile Forum in Almaty, another ten for relatives, all in a few weeks. But most of the time she lets inspiration, not quotas, decide the pace. Her grandchildren join her, shaping little pictures from wool while she plays Qazaq music in the background.

In these small scenes, Tolyq Adam is visible: aqyl (mind) guiding their skills, jurek (heart) anchoring them in culture, qairat (will) training them not to fear pain. Financially, the path is not easy. Wool, silk, and quality materials are expensive. She dreams of buying silk scarves to feel for 8 March, but often cannot afford the initial investment. Most of her learning still comes from free content on YouTube and Instagram. Access to formal grants and training is patchy. Some years earlier, when she completed the Bastau Business course, she applied for a grant to sew chapan but was rejected because she did not belong to a “privileged” social category.

Ironically, after registering as a person with a disability, she discovered that grants often prioritise people like her. She reads this with a mixture of realism and gratitude: “Support is actually good now, especially for creativity. Preference on grants is a plus.” Over time, her craft has grown from small items, simple tubeteika, to large tekemet pieces measuring two metres by 1.2 metres. Her apashki (elder women) dolls have been bought by foreigners; one of her works has even entered a museum collection. She recently received a grant of 1.5 million tenge, a concrete recognition that her talent has economic as well as cultural value. Her dream now is to open a larger workshop or school of sewing and feltmaking. She imagines a room filled with women, mothers of many children, pensioners from the Longevity Centre, young girls from universities, people with disabilities, rolling wool, sharing stories, relaxing away from household burdens. She has already tested the idea in small ways: conducting master classes at the Longevity Centre in Shymkent using fabric scraps from her home; visiting orphanages to teach children; planning a series of workshops at the Palace of Schoolchildren in Shymkent where kids could “draw with wool.” Each of these episodes is a rehearsal for the school she wants to build, a place where creativity becomes both therapy and livelihood.

Success, in her words, is not measured in tenge but in the ability “to create and to inspire others to realise their potential.” This is where her journey as an entrepreneur with disabilities departs from the deficit lens of the post-Soviet mindset. Her accident limited her mobility, but it did not shrink her world. Through felt, she has expanded it, connecting Shymkent to Almaty, Kyrgyzstan, America, England; connecting her mother’s loom to her grandchildren’s small hands; connecting personal pain to communal healing. In Aizhan’s life, Tolyq Adam is not a philosophical slogan but a lived practice. Her aqyl (mind) seeks new techniques, grant opportunities, and sustainable models. Her jurek (heart) insists on helping clients even when money is not counted, on teaching pensioners and orphans even when materials come from her own stash, and on filling her workshop with Qazaq music for the sake of her grandchildren’s souls. Her qairat (will) carries her through physical limitations, bereavement, and financial uncertainty, pushing her to travel to festivals, keep learning, and continue dreaming of a school that does not yet exist.

From a hotel room in Turkestan to a yurt at the World Nomad Games, from a small home workshop to the idea of a community felt centre, her narrative shows how an entrepreneur with disability can transform vulnerability into a source of moral strength. Each vest, doll, and tekemet she creates is more than an object for sale; it is a quiet act of resistance against a world that often measures people by productivity alone. Through her craft, Aizhan offers Qazaqstan another measure of value, one woven from care, courage, and the enduring warmth of human hands working wool into something that breathes. Throughout her life, she has been supported by her mother, daughters, brothers, daughters-in-law, friends and doctors

Akmaral Sidegaliyeva grew up in the wide, wind-brushed lands of Atyrau Oblast, in a village where days moved slowly and family ties shaped the rhythm of life. She remembers her childhood as one filled with warmth, noise, and tenderness, the kind of home where everyone looked after one another, where modest means were balanced by generous hearts. Her parents were steady, hardworking people, and their quiet discipline shaped her early sense of self. From a young age she learned to help where help was needed, to listen before speaking, and to move through the world with humility. She did not imagine herself as someone who would one day run a business, manage accounts, or make decisions that shaped the future of other families. Her dreams were simple then. She imagined finishing her education, finding meaningful work, and building a stable family life. As a young woman, she became a lawyer by training, a profession that suited her careful mind and patience with detail. She liked documents, numbers, the clarity of rules and procedures, the sense that things could be ordered and understood if only you took the time. She married a mathematics teacher, a gentle, thoughtful man whose steady confidence complemented her quiet pragmatism. Together they imagined a life built on learning, mutual support, and service to their community.

Nothing in her early life prepared her for the sudden violence of the accident that changed everything. It was 2021, an ordinary day that ruptured into something irreversible. She remembers fragments: the shock, the pain, the confusion, the long quiet afterward when doctors confirmed that the injury to her leg was permanent. She became a Category III disabled person, a label that felt both clinical and heavy, something that marked her not just in official documents but in her own understanding of her body. For a while she tried not to think about it, as if ignoring the change might make it less real. But the truth was that nothing would ever be the same again. Before the accident she had already stepped into the world of entrepreneurship. She and her husband had opened a small study center for children, born from a simple gap in their region: there was no tutoring center, and parents had begun asking her husband if he could offer lessons. But combining full-time school teaching with individual tutoring had become impossible. “We didn’t have a teachers’ center in our area,” she recalls. “Parents were asking, and it wasn’t possible for my husband to handle it alone.” So they opened their own center, modest at first, but built on genuine need. Akmaral’s role emerged naturally. She handled the accounting, the official registrations, the legal paperwork, the structure that held the business together. “I’m a lawyer by education,” she says. “Working with papers and computer programs is interesting to me.” There was joy in it, the joy of competence, of seeing her skills matter, of contributing something essential to the life she and her husband were building together

But after the accident, everything had to be relearned: how to move, how to pace herself, how to handle pain that arrived suddenly and stayed unpredictably. She faced the familiar post-Soviet mindset toward disability, where illness is often seen as a weakness and people with disabilities are expected to retreat from public life. Yet she refused to internalize those assumptions. When asked whether she ever felt like giving up, she answers simply, “I am a very positive person. That helped me a lot.” It was not naïve positivity but something deeper, a deliberate, quiet refusal to collapse. She found strength in faith, in her children, in the routines of work.

This attitude shaped the next phase of her life. Even though her leg required rehabilitation, even though she fell ill more often, even though unpredictability interrupted her routines, she returned to the study center as soon as she could. She no longer took on physical tasks, but she expanded her administrative role, supporting the growing number of students and managing the paperwork that kept the center functioning. She found meaning in being useful, in staying connected to life beyond her disability. Still, the balancing act was difficult. “I can’t say I keep a balance,” she admits. “If we focus too much on work, we forget rehabilitation. If we focus on family matters, rehabilitation is forgotten again.” Her honesty reveals something universal about women’s lives, especially lives of women with disabilities, where self-care is often the first sacrifice, where family and work crowd out the very health that sustains them. Her days were rarely structured. She describes herself as someone who “goes with the flow,” someone who knows the value of discipline and planning but struggles to implement it. This selfawareness is part of her narrative, she does not pretend to be the perfect entrepreneur. She is still learning, still adjusting, still finding a rhythm that fits her new body.

Family support became essential. She and her husband live with her parents, a multigenerational household that is common across Qazaqstan but that gained new significance after her accident. “My husband’s parents and my parents help a lot,” she says. “They help with the kids and the housework.” Their support allowed her to keep working and to focus on the parts of the business she could manage from home. Entrepreneurship opened unexpected doors for her. Unlike salaried work, where taking sick leave requires paperwork and permission, running her own business gave her the autonomy to seek medical consultations abroad, schedule rehabilitation, and invest in her health. “When you work for yourself,” she says, “you can organize everything and open opportunities for treatment and knowledge.” Business became a pathway not just to income, but to dignity, control, and possibility. The accident did not fundamentally change her role in the business, but it changed her relationship with herself. She learned to recognize her resilience, to take pride in contributing despite limitations, and to value the emotional stamina that entrepreneurship demands.

Her journey makes visible the emotional labor often hidden behind entrepreneurial success. There were moments of exhaustion, moments when she forgot to care for herself, moments when the pressures of raising children and supporting the business collided. But she persevered with a softness that reveals its own strength, the kind of strength that does not shout, but endures. She faced structural barriers too. Banks rejected her application for business loans because her pension fund contributions were paused during maternity leave. “I wanted to develop our business,” she explains, “but they refused because the pension fund wasn’t growing.” She wishes the system offered more flexibility, more trust, more tailored opportunities for entrepreneurs with disabilities. Her critique is gentle but firm: “It would be great if they didn’t look at social payments, and if there were more relief and opportunities.”

She acknowledges that Qazaqstan has made progress. Programs like Business Bastau and grants for socially vulnerable groups helped her at crucial moments. She hopes these programs will continue to expand, especially with practical training that enables people to earn immediately. “If people see that they can earn right away,” she says, “they gain motivation.” Through all of this, she never encountered direct discrimination. Her community respected her, perhaps because she did not present herself as a victim. She carried herself with calm dignity, and people responded with the same. Her definition of success reveals the quiet philosophy that guides her life. “Success,” she says, “is networking, being useful to the community, having good relations with family, reaching your goals.” It is not money, not prestige, not competition. It is harmony. This harmony echoes the spirit of the Tolyq Adam: a life where mind, heart, and will move together. Akmaral does not use these words, but her actions reveal them. Her mind shapes the business, manages the accounts, and solves the problems that arise. Her heart shows in the tenderness with which she speaks about her children, her gratitude to her parents, her desire to help her community. Her will is evident in the decision to keep working after the accident, to return to life rather than retreat from it. Her children are her motivation. She wants to leave them not just a business, but an example, a way of living that honors both responsibility and hope. She wants them to grow into strong, confident, selfsufficient people who can stand firmly in the world. Her daughter, already involved in dance and singing and modeling, gives her particular pride. “I want her to be able to support herself in any situation,” she says. Her son, still young, brings her joy with every small milestone.

Looking back, she has no regrets. She would not change the business, the choices, or the timing. She moves through life step by step, trusting that what is meant for her will unfold in time. When asked what entrepreneurship has given her, she answers without hesitation: “Freedom. You are your own boss. You can plan your life, be with your family, build relationships.” Her story is not dramatic. It is not filled with grand gestures or loud victories. It is the story of a woman who chose steadiness over surrender, dignity over despair, purpose over passivity. It is the story of a life rebuilt not through sudden transformation but through daily persistence. In a society where people with disabilities are often expected to retreat, Akmaral offers a different image, one of competence, contribution, and quiet leadership. Her work benefits her family, her community, and the children who learn in the center she helps sustain. Her life reminds us that strength does not always announce itself; sometimes it simply continues. Her final advice to others is simple, but it carries all the weight of her lived experience: “Start a business, take risks, do not give up, and remember you are equal to everyone else.” In these words, her mind, heart, and will stand together, an everyday wholeness that defines her path.

Alfiya Alpysbayeva grew up in a home filled with the soft hum of a sewing machine. Her mother stitched Quraq Korpe for neighbors, piecing fabric into comfort and tradition. As a child, Alfiya played alongside the fabrics, cutting tiny outfits for dolls. But sewing was never something she imagined for herself. She dreamed of bigger stages, sketching dresses and interiors in her school notebooks, dancing since she was four, imagining a future where creativity and movement defined her path. “I always thought I’d become a designer,” she recalls. “And then I thought I’d become a choreographer.” Life felt wide open then, a journey she would walk with two lungs, a dancer’s stamina, and the future shining in front of her. In 2019, she left for China, carried by ambition and a scholarship she earned through her own determination. The world was expanding, new cultures, new languages, the thrill of being away from home. But within a semester, everything collapsed. The pandemic shut the borders, and she and her classmates were forced to return home at their own expense. “We flew through South Korea, and it ended up being extremely expensive,” she says. She came home thinking the worst was behind her. Instead, nine months later, her life turned sharply. Tuberculosis. She was first placed into the mild treatment category. But two months passed, no progress. Weight fell from her body unnoticed. “I lost 14 kilograms… I was so thin … it was terrible.” Eventually, doctors moved her to the most severe category. A year of medication, a relentless fight to breathe, and still, her left lung failed. They prepared her for surgery. On January 26, 2022, everything she knew about her body and her identity changed.

During surgery, her heart stopped. Doctors paused, waiting between life and death. “Either it would start beating again… or they would pronounce me dead.” A miracle, her heart beat once more. She woke into a world where one lung carried the full burden of keeping her alive.

Instead of seeing disability as a limitation, she reframed it as part of her destiny. When she returned home, she needed a way to continue life, to earn, to rebuild. Bags with bold prints had begun trending. “I saw them and thought, I want to try making them.” She sat at her mother’s sewing machine, a tool she had never learned to use, and created a shopper bag on her very first try. “I thought, I must have talent!” she laughs, that spark of wonder still fresh in her voice. A forgotten childhood dream, to be a fashion designer, resurfaced. Creativity flowed through her fingertips. She added ornaments, unique fabrics, her own prints. And slowly, bags expanded into clothing, children’s ensembles, dance costumes, custom designs bursting with individuality. Her mother teased her, saying, “Usually, shoemakers are without shoes, but in your case, you make things for yourself first.” Deep inside, even while lying in a hospital bed, a single conviction kept her anchored:

That was her qairat (will), the part of her that refused to surrender. Entrepreneurship didn’t appear by magic. With one lung and a fragile heart, she worked and studied simultaneously. Her first attempts to win grant support failed, twice. Friends doubted. People whispered, “What if you fail again?” But Alfiya never believed she had anything to lose. “Why should I be afraid? If I win, great. If not, I’ll try again.”

She won her first grant from Bastau Business, 1,380,000 tenge, and bought her first professional sewing machines and materials. No longer dependent on her mother’s equipment, she felt the thrill of independence swell inside her. Then came the biggest turning point, the TalpynUp project, business training with a psychological foundation. Over six months, she poured herself into learning, implementing, growing. Out of 450 women from Qazaqstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan, only 15 were honored at the final graduation ceremony in Shymkent. Alfiya stood among them, receiving a diploma from the U.S. Ambassador, and a confirmation that the girl with lung scars and a fierce heart had earned her place. “I already knew I’d be on that list,” she smiles. “I worked hard. I put in everything.” But burnout also found her. Perfectionism can be exhausting. “Sometimes one piece just wouldn’t turn out right several times… every day, and you start to burn out.” The incredible pressure of working alone, deadlines stacking up, pain in her ribs during cold seasons, long hours at the sewing table, eventually led her to a breaking point. She cried. She felt weak. She felt stuck.

Then she learned something that changed her life: “You have to take care of yourself first. You are the person you need the most.” She learned to rest without guilt. She started boxing again, then fitness, “not for fights, just to train for myself.” She went to therapy, ten sessions that brought emotional stability. She prayed Tahajjud in the quiet of night. Her ability to regenerate, mentally and spiritually, became a form of heart strengthening.

Today, at 25, Alfiya is unstoppable in her dreams. She teaches Chinese and Korean at a private center, saving money to open a studio where customers can walk in, see her work, and where she can employ older women, to sew, to teach, to earn with dignity. She listens to Qazaq ethnic music when she designs, especially the composition “Orleu.” “It felt like they created that piece for me,” she says softly. “Like it was telling my story.” Culture is her inspiration, her grounding. She loves her people “even with all the stereotypes,” and she wants her fashion, uniquely “ethno-modern,” to celebrate them. Disability, she says, has helped more than hindered: “It’s like a reward for the challenges I’ve gone through.” She sees grants not as charity, but as recognition of struggle and perseverance, mind learning how to navigate an imperfect system. Alfiya is not shaped by others’ expectations. She hates stereotypes that confine women to housework. “Even if I got married, I wouldn’t just sit at home,” she laughs. “And I hate cleaning!” She refuses to be boxed in, not by gender, not by disability, not by fear.

“I don’t want to be like everyone else…I want to be myself … unique.” She has survived what many never face. She lost part of her body, but gained a sharpened sense of purpose. She became her own protector, her own motivation. She dreams not only of business success, but of lifting others with her, financially, emotionally, spiritually. In ten years, she imagines her sewing studio as a network across Qazaqstan, and maybe internationally. Perhaps she will open an educational center. Or even a pulmonology clinic, a nod to those who share her scars. She dreams of becoming a UN ambassador, protecting children and women’s rights.

Success, for Alfiya, is not fame or money, it is the ability to breathe life into others while continuing to breathe through one lung. Her narrative is not of disability, it is a narrative of harmony: of aqyl (mind), jurek (heart) and qairat (will). A Tolyq Adam, becoming whole through struggle, through creation, through love for her people. And she’s only just beginning.

Abai warns that the mind can be destroyed by sloth, indifference, senseless amusement, or destructive passion. Aliya’s life has been a continual refusal of these harmful states. She could have retreated into despair when inspectors hid her in the archives to conceal her disability. She could have abandoned her dreams when a stroke stole her strength or when criminals threatened her business and children. She could have stayed home, unseen, when shame told her not to walk with a cane at a marathon. But she resisted every temptation to withdraw from life. She moved forward, sometimes slowly, sometimes with the help of strangers, always with dignity. Her life illustrates how Abai saw the path to becoming a Tolyq Adam, not through grand rhetoric but through small acts of steadfastness. Her story is the opposite of careless sloth or “senseless amusement.” She lives consciously, attentively, choosing joy as something earned, not given. Even her dreams, to open a logistics warehouse, to one day cook and teach in a working kitchen, to climb a summit that suits her step, reflect Abai’s belief in the need to keep one’s mind active and one’s talents alive. In Abai’s words we hear the philosophy; in Aliya’s life, we see it breathing.

Aliya Kanadilova likes to say she never set out to become an entrepreneur. “Things just came together on their own,” she often laughs. But behind that modest phrase lies a story shaped by hardship and held together by her sharp aqyl (mind), her generous jurek (heart), and qairat (will) that pulls her from bed each morning, reminding her that she is alive not just to survive, but to live. She was born in the Urals region, in a family where work was done with hands and patience. Her mother, originally from the Donetsk region, wove carpets from childhood. The click of the loom, the precision of each thread, the beauty that emerged from care, all of this seeped into Aliya without anyone needing to teach her. As a girl she loved textiles, beads, tapestries. Craft was a language in her home, and she learned to speak it early. By her twenties she was building a very different kind of life. She worked for a foreign company, traveling often on business trips, proud of her independence. “My hands worked, my head worked, so everything was good,” she remembers. Ambition stretched out ahead of her like an open road

Then at twenty-five, on the way back from a worksite, that road shattered. The accident fractured her spine in two places. Bone fragments entered the thoracic area and caused additional damage. “At first my legs gave out, and then my hands,” she says. For a long time she was bedridden, a body in rebellion against the fire inside her that refused to go out. She was not married yet. Her parents, ordinary, hardworking people, became her lifeline. “They even sold a cow to help me,” she says quietly. With their support and long hospital months, she began a slow return to movement: thousands of exercises, trying to hold a cup, trying to sit independently, trying to stand. A wheelchair followed. Crutches later. Even now, she says, “Every day for me is a fight. If I relax even once, it gets worse.”

There were other wounds too, social ones. After the accident she was assigned the first disability group, and at that time in Qazaqstan, someone with that status “was not allowed to work.” Inspectors arrived at the office and colleagues hid her in the archives. She remembers people saying, “If they find out you’re working, you’ll have to return your pension.” She learned silence. She learned how to disappear before anyone forced her to. Shame, not hers, wrapped around the label “invalid.” For many years she hid her disability status, avoiding questions and pity.

But the foreign company did something rare: they refused to discard her. Instead, they brought the world to her. They built her a home office: “They told me, ‘Your hands work, your head works, so you can work.’” They hired caregivers, sent couriers, installed special equipment. When she returned to the office with a cane, they moved to a wheelchair-accessible floor and made sure she could enter the workplace with dignity. Through their actions, they reminded her: she remained a full human being. Entrepreneurship arrived quietly, woven into her love for craft. She began ordering Swarovski crystals and Japanese seed beads since no one sold them in Qazaqstan. But suppliers sold only in bulk. Other women asked, “Can I buy some from you?” It began like that, no strategy, just need. She and a friend, both young mothers on maternity leave, rented a tiny space, unpacked shipments next to strollers, and taught simple master classes. “When I started, I didn’t have a big goal. And in two or three months, a shop appeared.” They named it Solnyshko.kz, little sun.

When her friend moved away and Aliya became pregnant with twins, she considered closing. But her mother and husband told her not to. She managed the orders online, others handled sales in person. The shop survived currency swings, competition, and even a shift to Astana, where the family moved twelve years ago so she could access better medical care. Solnyshko.kz kept going. “Even when others were closing,” she says, “ours didn’t stop.” Life gave more battles. Eight years after the accident, when she could walk with crutches, she married the man who still stands beside her. Doctors insisted pregnancy was too dangerous. She and her husband spent six months fighting for permission, finding a young gynecologist who supported them. With that help came her first daughter, then a son, then twin girls. She also carries the memory of a lost fifth child. “Whatever anyone says, having many children is a huge joy,” she says, eyes softening. “Maybe the children are what push me to live actively.”

In 2018, when the twins were small, she suffered a stroke. It left her left side weak. She walks now with a cane on the right; leaning on it for ten years caused a bone spur. Her left heel remains fragile. Climbing stairs can feel like scaling a cliff. But she drives. She escorts her children everywhere. She works between school pickups and meals. “Physically it’s hard,” she says. “But in my head I live a full life.” Sport called her back, too. Before the accident, she ran marathons. Shame silenced that part of her for years. Then six years ago she showed up at a marathon with a cane. She waited for most runners to pass, then walked, slowly but determined, across the finish line. “That’s when I realized I will not forbid myself the things I love, no matter what others think.” Today she proudly does Nordic walking in marathons, moving at her own pace, toward her own finish. But entrepreneurship holds its own trials. Two years ago she faced something she still struggles to speak about: “an organized group” tried to seize her shop. Threatening messages. Photos of her children in their courtyard. Police inspections that mysteriously appeared. “From April to September it was hell.” A Chechen lawyer helped them fight back. The shop survived. But the fear took a toll. Still, she says, “If you can carry yourself through it, the rest can be resolved.” Her shop became more than business. It became a place of learning, especially for girls from a school for the hearingimpaired. “They follow the pattern with their eyes. They embroider silently.” Solnyshko.kz helps them find work with designers who value fine embroidery. “We try to give them a fishing rod,” she says, “not just a fish.” She believes craft is heritage. “Our ancestors were artisans. One day Qazaq craft will be recognized as art, like in Europe.” She organizes competitions, celebrates quality, encourages pride.

Motherhood threads through everything. Her weekly schedule is a map of four children’s lives, school, lessons, therapy, responsibilities. “Otherwise, you can’t keep it all in your head,” she laughs. She teaches her older children to drive, believing independence is learned early. She loves them fiercely and, yes, scolds them when needed. “Part of success I already have … many children,” she smiles. “What remains is to open those personal dreams.” And there are dreams, a cleaning and cooking “clinic” where she could teach homemaking as a craft; a small logistics business since goods fill every corner of the apartment; maybe even her own restaurant kitchen, where she could feel the heartbeat of food being made. And always, somewhere inside, she imagines a summit, maybe not Everest anymore, but still a peak that demands courage. She knows the barriers: missing railings, steep ramps, heavy doors, elevators that don’t work. She has endured strangers shouting when she parks in a disabled spot, blocking her car. “It still hurts,” she says. “If someone spits at you, you can’t pretend it didn’t happen.” But with age … or maybe experience … came another truth: “I used to be embarrassed. Now I stand up for my rights.” She does not want to use disability to evoke pity. For twenty years she hid it. Two years ago, she finally spoke openly. “It felt like I was naked.” But she no longer hides. She speaks now for women who write to her saying they lost hope … until they saw her living, working, laughing.

She measures success not in revenue but in fullness: “I have a shop, a car, a husband, a family. And I manage a lot despite illness.” She smiles when women say, “I want to be like you.” She responds, “Don’t divide people into categories. It all comes down to desire and planning.” She believes being useful saved her. When she was in a wheelchair, she visited hospitals to support injured children. On Instagram she replies to messages telling her she gave someone strength to try again. “Maybe that’s what helped me get out of the chair,” she wonders aloud. Aliya does not claim to be extraordinary. “I’m just the way I am,” she says. But the truth shines through her humility: she is crafting a life that is entirely her own, bead by bead, step by careful step, and inviting others to believe that they can do the same.

Abai reminds us that reason must not be suffocated by fear: “If freedom is not bestowed upon reason, then what about the truth?” Almat lives this freedom of mind every day. He questions complacency, challenges outdated policies, and refuses to treat dependency as an identity. His cause, the dignity and economic integration of people with disabilities, is a just cause. And as Abai teaches, such a cause fears no scrutiny. It gains strength from truth, from transparency, and from the perseverance to continue even when success seems improbable. Almat’s journey shows what happens when someone believes that good is not merely received, it is built. It shows how a person becomes whole not through what they lack or possess, but through what they stand for. Through his actions, Almat expresses Abai’s vision of humanity, one that refuses to attribute all outcomes to fate, but instead believes in the power of aqyl (mind), jurek (heart), and qairat (will) to change what is unjust. His leadership insists that inclusion and equality are not miracles granted from above; they are the results of ordinary people choosing to act extraordinarily for the benefit of others.

Almat Nauryzbayev was born in a Qazaqstan that was still Soviet, a place where life paths were mostly decided before a child even understood they were walking them. He grew up surrounded by the rhythms of a system in transition, where people believed stability came from the state and ambition was something kept quietly inside one’s chest. His earliest memories are filled with running freely, sunlight on his face, and the confidence of a boy who did not yet know what challenge meant. That changed in the fifth grade. An accident damaged his eyesight permanently. At an age when children usually fear monsters under the bed, he faced a monster far more real, total blindness. Doctors classified him as a Group 1 visually impaired person. “It’s written on my forehead that I cannot see,” he says simply now, without self-pity and without hesitation. For him, blindness was not a tragedy. It was a direction. But it took time. Losing sight meant losing ease, familiarity, and the expectation of a predictable future. In Soviet Qazaqstan, disability was not merely a physical condition, it was a label, a boundary drawn around a life. Society feared disability more than it understood it, and many visually impaired children were placed in segregated schools that became insulated bubbles. He describes it plainly:

Yet Almat refused to shrink. He spoke with others confidently, he challenged norms and assumptions, and he walked into rooms as though he had every right to be there, because he did. Where others adapted quietly, he moved with a certain defiant independence.

His life took a dramatic turn when perestroika came. The Soviet Union began to unravel, and with it, all the economic structures that once held society together. The sudden collapse of jobs, salaries, and certainty forced people to choose: wait for salvation or act

Almat chose action. He was a student in mechanics and applied mathematics at the time, a field that already demanded precision and boldness. “I always gathered my classmates and organized things,” he recalls. “I was always the leader.” They began selling cars, any business that promised survival. As Qazaqstan stumbled into a market economy, he learned entrepreneurship the hard way: by doing it. He advanced rapidly, shifting into production, creating foil caps for vodka bottles, then tin cans and lids for preserving jars, later expanding into other packaging materials. “In Qazaqstan, I don’t think there was a larger company than mine in that line of work,” he says matter-of-factly. No competitors. No limits. Blindness did not stop him, he simply adapted. “Of course, you depend on your environment, but it never affected me.” He relied on teams he trusted, using aqyl (mind) to strategize, qairat (will) to navigate risk, and jurek (heart) to lead boldly. He took out a 2 million KZT loan, something he still marvels at. “I was a second-year blind student, and they gave me money! To this day, I still don’t understand how.” That period of expansion gave him what he now values most, a sense of dignity. Entrepreneurship became his stage for becoming fully human again, a Tolyq Adam in Abai’s sense, mind, heart, and will working in harmony

But with great risk came collapse. The 2008 global financial crisis hit Qazaqstan like an earthquake. His business, once thriving, began to crumble under debt and shrinking markets. By 2015, he had to shut it down entirely. The loan still had to be repaid. The wounds of loss were sharp, but he never allowed them to define him.

His wife and children walked every step of that journey with him, each moment turning family into a pillar rather than a burden. “My business became a family business,” he explains. When entrepreneurship faded, a new purpose emerged, one rooted not only in building a livelihood but in building a community. He turned his attention, and his leadership, to the Qazaq Society of the Blind, a public association established in 1937 that today unites around 12,000 visually impaired people across the country. It includes 19 production enterprises, employing almost 3,000 workers, the majority living with disabilities. Like many institutions that survived the fall of the USSR, the Society had endured corruption. Its previous chairman, totally blind and a Doctor of Economics, was sentenced to prison for embezzling 1 190 million tenge. When this leader fell, the organization needed someone with integrity and real-world resilience. Almat stepped forward.

Since becoming chairman in 2017, he has channeled every resource into modernization, upgrading machinery, reopening production lines, and rebuilding what was once lost. “We, blind people, built all this,” he says with pride that carries no arrogance. He lists their achievements as if they are ordinary: a rehabilitation center in Almaty, 2,250 square meters, built during the pandemic using their own funds; a printing house for books in Braille; multiple new leisure centers and workshops; and a newly purchased wellness complex in Astana with a swimming pool and gym.

He laughs when others ask where he finds energy. “Nowhere,” he says. “You don’t have time to think about that. A person must always stay busy … if they have too much free time, that’s when problems begin.” Yet being productive is not just a strategy. It is his philosophy, to live meaningfully and to ensure others do as well. He sees the world clearly, despite having no sight. The systemic barriers are endless: “Is it easy for a person with disabilities to do business? It’s almost impossible.” Access to capital, state bureaucracy, employment quotas, tender rules that can destroy a company over a missed signature, these are not abstract policies but lived obstacles. “The state must create conditions. That’s what we don’t have.” There is anger in his voice when he talks about ministries and officials who refuse to listen. But his anger is the kind that comes from care, from a heart committed to justice. “We need ideology,” he says. “Not privileges. A powerful idea that lifts the nation’s spirit.”

Without naming it, he embodies Abai’s warning: that a country without moral strength becomes a country without progress. He has traveled widely, China, the Emirates, always learning. “We read a lot, we study a lot. All day long,” he says. Accessible technologies allow him to consume information constantly, talking phones, talking laptops. Blindness is not a barrier to knowledge. In moments of difficulty, he does not turn inward with despair. He adapts, moves, builds again. “Suicide? That’s not an option for us.” His resilience is less about heroism and more about refusal, refusal to stop, to complain, to be pitied. When asked how entrepreneurship has shaped him, he speaks with quiet steadiness: “Through this work I’ve grown, tremendously. Now I can speak on equal terms with anyone. With anyone at all.” That equality of voice, that is aqyl (mind), the intellect of someone who earns respect not by demanding it but by proving it daily. He dreams of returning to business once a new board is elected. His children already manage parts of the enterprise; he sees the future not as retirement but as another chapter. “If my health allows, I’ll stay active. I won’t let anyone sit idle.” He teaches courage through example rather than speeches. When younger entrepreneurs with disabilities ask for advice, he offers them Confucius instead of comfort: “The wise man is not the one who never fell, but the one who fell and rose again.”

He does not romanticize disability. He does not call it a blessing. He simply refuses to let it be a boundary.

Almat Nauryzbayev’s journey is a reminder that wholeness is not about perfect circumstances, but a perfect alignment of heart, mind, and will. He stands as a Tolyq Adam not because life was easy, but because he insisted on living fully even when it wasn’t. Thousands of visually impaired Qazaq citizens now walk into workplaces he helped build. They earn salaries, develop skills, gather in leisure centers, travel to rehabilitation complexes, and experience themselves not as objects of charity but as active participants in their nation’s future. His story is not only about one man’s resilience. It is about the collective empowerment he ignited, a shared belief within the community that “we, the blind, can build.”

And they do. Through Almat’s efforts, inclusion in Qazaqstan has begun to shift from rhetoric to reality, not because the system supported them, but because they supported each other. His sight may have dimmed long ago, but his vision has only gotten sharper.

There are stories that begin with thunder, and there are stories that begin with silence. Anara Abzhanova’s life opened in the quietest register of all, the fragile breath of a child born seven months into pregnancy, so small her mother feared even the wind might harm her. She grew up in a modest home in old Almaty, raised by a single mother who had once been a physics teacher. Despite financial limitation, their home carried warmth, affection, and something far more rare, the belief that a child must grow freely. “My mother gave me complete freedom,” Anara recalls, and that freedom became the language through which she learned to understand the world. By the age of two or three, she lost her hearing entirely. The silence that entered her life could have become a wall, a border that marked her as separate. Instead, it became the threshold of a different kind of perception.

Where sound ended, sensitivity began. She learned to read the flicker of light, the tremor of emotion on someone’s face, the rhythm of nature. Her world was not diminished; it simply reordered itself. There is a line in Qazaq jurekpen koru (to see with the heart), and Anara embodied it long before she had the words for it. Her childhood flowed between two landscapes: the old streets of Almaty and the vast, unbroken Qazaq steppe. She calls herself a “steppe girl,” a child who knew the feel of the earth beneath her feet and the taste of dusty summer wind. In the village, she played with other children, wandered fields, and lived in a way that felt boundless. But life also showed her its fragility early. She once fell into a water reservoir and nearly drowned. Someone pulled her out just in time. She remembers this moment as her “second birthday,” a reminder that life holds you even when you slip, that fate sometimes chooses to return you gently to the world you almost left. At fifteen, her mother, the center of her universe, fell gravely ill. She lost her speech and underwent complex surgeries. For a year, their small house filled with silence of a different kind: fear, helplessness, and the unknown. Anara remembers climbing to the attic at night, sitting beneath a small window where she could see the moon. She would draw in the dim light, whispering her hopes into the night sky. “I looked at the stars and asked the moon to give my mother her health back.” Her mother eventually recovered, not gradually, but like a sudden mercy. It strengthened Anara’s belief that unseen forces move quietly in our lives, supporting us in ways we never fully understand.

The foundations of her artistic life were laid in 1998 when her mother enrolled her in a small art studio for deaf children. There she met Alexey Utkin, the teacher who would shape her artistic identity. “His school became the foundation of my professional growth,” she explains. Under his guidance, she learned not only technique but also discipline, visual language, and confidence in her gift. She painted her first serious work at twelve, and someone immediately tried to buy it, an astonishing moment for a shy girl who rarely believed she could be seen. “For the first time, I felt that I could be the master of my own destiny.”

That realization became a seed of the willpower that Abai describes as essential to the Tolyq Adam. Her teenage years were marked by achievement. She won the Grand Prix at the “ZhuldizAi” festival and later at the international “Shabyt” competition. Encouraged by her success, she entered the Zhurgenov College of Arts, then earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Qazaq National Academy of Arts. Eventually she returned as a teacher, guiding young artists through the same corridors where she once stood uncertain and hopeful. Over time, she developed a personal style she calls romantic realism, a way of painting that blends memory, emotion, and poetic vision.

Flowers, blossoms, spring light, Sievers apple trees, winter streets, everything she painted carried softness and emotional clarity, as though each canvas held a memory breathing beneath it. Among her works, none is more defining than her series Shades of White. It was born from a childhood moment she carries like a sacred photograph. She was studying at an internat for children with hearing impairments. One evening, her mother had promised to bring her a cake. Hours passed. The teachers told her to go to bed. Snow fell in soft, glowing flakes outside the window. She remained there, waiting, and then she saw her mother, exhausted, holding two bags of sweets and the promised cake. Anara says, “Snow was falling quietly in soft flakes… and then I saw my mom: she was holding two bags of treats and the promised cake.” The moment marked her deeply. Snow became more than weather; it became memory, devotion, and love. “‘Shades of White’ is about memory, warmth, care, and light,” she explains. Through it, she paints her mother’s love again and again, refusing to let that tenderness fade.

Her art slowly evolved into a livelihood. In 2018, she formally registered her art business. She has sold more than 300 original pieces, but she also began to understand that sustainability requires diversification. “Art can bring not only onetime income… but also passive income.” With clear reasoning, she enrolled in art marketing courses, studied portfolio strategy, and began building collections meant for licensing: notebooks, stationery, packaging designs. She wasn’t abandoning art; she was expanding its reach, ensuring it could support her family while remaining true to her heart. Family, for Anara, is a universe of its own. She is a mother of three daughters, Alua, Amina, and the youngest. She speaks of them with a tenderness that softens her voice. “All three are my wings, my source of inspiration, strength, and meaning.” Her husband, Timur, a sign language interpreter, is both partner and anchor. Their meeting, she believes, was destined. “Sometimes I feel that our meeting was destined from above.” Even though her entrepreneurial ambitions are not always fully understood by her family, she draws strength simply from their presence. “It gives me the strength to keep moving forward.”

Her values, kindness, love, honesty, and respect, come from her mother. “Love is the main value my mother taught me.” Through these principles, she anchors her work in something deeper than recognition or income. Yet like every entrepreneur, she faced real challenges. She struggled with financial literacy, with building a stable team, with navigating the demands of social media. “Social media requires a lot of time and attention.” She also once secured a major grant, more than 700,000 tenge, but had to pause the project due to the pandemic. These disruptions tested her, but each struggle contributed to the reconstruction of her identity as an entrepreneur. “My true victory is within myself,” she says, and this statement reflects the inner evolution Abai describes: the merging of reason, heart, and will into a full, resilient self. Her mission is clear and steady. “Through my paintings, I give the viewer emotions and a part of my soul.” She believes art can heal, communicate, and console. It is, for her, a universal language: “Art for me is a way to speak without words.” Her silence is not emptiness; it is eloquence in another form. Her resilience is not noisy triumph but quiet, continuous courage. What emerges from Anara’s journey is the portrait of a woman who turned silence into artistry, fragility into strength, and memory into purpose. Her life is shaped by a heart attentive to beauty, and the will to keep moving despite obstacles. It is shaped by the clarity to expand her art into a sustainable business, and the wisdom to anchor her purpose in meaning rather than ambition

Through her work, she contributes something invaluable to Qazaqstan’s cultural landscape: a reminder that art carries its own form of inclusion, its own way of widening the world. Her canvases offer solace, reflection, and emotional truth. And her entrepreneurship challenges the narrow post-Soviet assumptions about disability. Instead of hiding her difference, she turns it into a source of sensitivity, creativity, and depth. In the end, Anara’s narrative is a testament to a life lived fully, where hardship did not dim her spirit but sharpened her vision. She has created a world where silence becomes luminous, where beauty is a form of resilience, and where every stroke of paint is an act of hope. Her journey shows us that the human soul, when guided by heart, mind, and will, can transform even the quietest life into something extraordinary.

Andrey exhibits reasoned, learning faith (aqyl). He keeps studying — courses, seminars, technologies, because he knows that integrity without knowledge can drift into piety without use. His factory math (ratios, weights, lifespans) and policy critique (life-cycle cost, Environmental Code) show the aqyl Abai demands of conscious believers. Truth over expediency: Abai warns against bending truth to fit convenience. Andrey challenges the “declarative” slogans that praise inclusion and ecology while rewarding the cheapest bid. He pays taxes “here, in my country,” files patents, asks for real mentorship, practices that bind words to deeds. Unity of aqyl-jurek-qairat (mind-heart-will): He marries technical reason (designs, molds, standards), a heart oriented to usefulness (“Success is being useful — Not for yourself, but for society”), and willpower that keeps showing up. That harmony is Abai’s measure of a whole human.

He introduces himself simply, “My name is Andrey Zelevsky, I am a social entrepreneur,” and then lets the work carry the weight of the narrative. In a district he calls one of the city’s best, the floor hums with the rhythm of recycled life: household plastic sorted by touch, ground down, measured by memory, pressed into blocks, curbs, paving tiles, and tactile indicators that guide the feet of blind and low-vision pedestrians. He is completely blind. Yet what most people step over, he has learned to hear: the shift of sacks, the scrape of pallets, the faint burr of a machine that needs adjusting. “Independence,” he says, “is when a person feels freer, when he knows what he’s doing.” He has fenced and organized the workshop so each movement is reliable. In that practiced order, aqyl (mind) finds its lane, qairat (will) keeps the pace, and jurek (heart ) remembers why the work matters. Andrey’s stubborn sense of responsibility began at home. “I cannot allow myself to throw trash around. My parents didn’t do that. My grandparents didn’t do that.” Sorting waste in the kitchen, teaching his own children to separate bottles, he carried a small ethic into a larger ambition: we are the state. If our streets are cluttered, our hands clean them. Long before this enterprise took form, he watched other entrepreneurs, “self-sufficient, confident, working 24/7,” and understood selfsufficiency as the ability to live with dignity, not just to earn. “To live with dignity … in a dignified country,” he says simply. That sentence became a compass.

His first venture started in 2007, when a wave of rhetoric promised special support for small and medium businesses, particularly for people with disabilities. He set up production of paving stones from sand and concrete because cement was cheap and near at hand. The promised scaffolding for founders with disabilities turned out to be mostly words, “declarative,” he calls it, so he paused without closing. The seed lay dormant but alive. A decade later, EXPO 2017 gave him a platform and a name for the impulse that had trailed him home from every curbside bin: Green Wave. He presented mobile shredders and a generator that could be hauled to landfills or forests to recycle at the source. People voted; he won; the shredder sold; he purchased the generator himself. When the borders tightened and logistics went strange in 2019–2020, he found local masters and used a 5.6-million-tenge regional grant to fabricate a press mold. The tile line began

The work is exacting. By touch he tracks distances, calibrates heat, counts the beat of the press. “Everything by touch, everything measured,” he says. He knows that a good 20-millimeter tile that will last requires roughly fifty kilograms of composite; that for each kilogram of plastic, he needs two kilograms of sand; that a thin PET bottle might weigh twenty grams, and he’ll need buckets of them to make one strong square. The factory math is mixed with father math, commuting to kindergarten drop-offs, then to the shop; training in the weight room; calling clients on the way home. He is a national champion and a world champion by rating in powerlifting. In bench press, squat, and deadlift, he has lifted a combined 395.5 kilograms, setting multiple records for Qazaqstan. “There’s satisfaction in producing less waste,” he smiles, and then, after a pause, adds the harder truth: “Monetization is a question. Ecology is a state task.” He knows that business coaches want to see the cash first. He also knows that every durable square he lays keeps 500 bottles’ worth of plastic out of a ditch and places a reliable texture under the cane of someone who navigates the city the way he does, by faith and fingertip.

His inventions, blocks and tiles, are patented; he holds the exclusive rights. The Environmental Code exists on paper; procurement rules once allowed recycled producers into tenders and now, he says, bar the door. Contractors choose cheaper tiles and pad margins; the cheap ones crumble in two or three years, and the city pays twice. “It all comes down to responsibility,” Andrey says, and then, more softly, to upbringing: whether one buys the leaky faucet again or saves for the one that lasts, whether a country replaces the quick fix with the long repair. There are bright spots: he completed a supplier contract under “Samruk-Kazyna,” delivered successfully to the “Welfare” fund, and placed his tactile tile at the Tolstoy Library, the district cultural center, the social protection office, and the central hospital.

Schools come for excursions; children take a small piece back as proof that yesterday’s trash can become tomorrow’s path. “When I first succeeded,” he remembers, “my daughter told everyone: ‘Dad makes gold!’” A Pakistani dye flashed under the lights; the tile looked like hammered metal. The child’s exaggeration rang true: the ordinary, turned luminous. Blindness is part of the narrative, but not the plot. He stands at a press conference when inspectors arrive and escort him out, surprised that “a disabled person” is working. He shrugs off the category. At the machine, your hands don’t show your label. He has met ministers and heads of departments who applaud his mission and then, in the chain beneath them, watched buyers tick the cheapest box. He has seen how easy it is to close a bank account and how hard to open a mind. “There’s always a way out,” he says, and you believe him because you hear how often he has chosen to look for one. He returns to courses, training, conferences, anything that sharpens skill. “When someone says they know a lot, I realize I know little.” Aqyl (mind) keeps studying; qairat (will) keeps applying; jurek (heart) keeps the work pointed toward others. Success, for Andrey, is being useful, “not for yourself, but for society.”

He is frank about the strain. Entrepreneurship compresses family time; fatigue finds everybody, working or idle. He has three employees and hopes to hire more when sales stabilize. Seasonality slows orders; websites and Instagram help, but a sales system is hard to build while you are also the inventor, operator, advocate, and father of four. Some nights, he trains; some mornings, he hauls; every day, he tries to widen the circle of use. He has two workshops now, tiles in one, paving stones in the other, and sketches a map for scaling: one or two more shops for the capital, five in Karaganda where logistics are easier. He imagines ritual products, cemetery tiles, fences, mobile constructions, so that recycled dignity accompanies people from the clinic entrance to the last, quiet lane. The barriers he names are familiar to many founders, but carry a special edge when the founder cannot simply “go here, go there” to collect forms, argue clauses, or chase signatures. “The hardest thing is getting the right information,” he admits. Digitization and AI promise clarity; the lived experience still depends on human consultants who rush the explanation. He wants a mentorship system with teeth: practical guides embedded in departments, real accompaniment after a grant lands, not just a reporting deadline and a handshake. Social entrepreneurship, he insists, should work like venture funding, initial bets, then staged support for the few that prove both useful and viable. He has applied to platforms abroad and at home, to the Nazarbayev Fund, the Ministry of Industry, the Industrial Development Fund: “so far, silence.” He has also learned to solve problems near hand, local machinists for the mold, neighborhood containers for collection, his own children bringing sacks of bottles from the kitchen to the shop

It would be easy to cast Andrey as a lone hero pushing against indifferent structures, but his narrative is braided with a quieter ecosystem — steady family, chance allies, and a cultural memory that refuses waste. “Our ancestors never left a mess behind,” he says. Iron was reused, not scattered. That ethic threads through his days, along with a practice of gratitude: when the regional contest called his idea “unprofitable,” he returned five more times until it wasn’t. When a promised order fell through, he recorded the loss and kept the line running. When someone quipped that he was “lucky” to have a pension and a business, he explained the taxes he pays and the pride of paying them “here, in my country,” so that public funds cycle back into public good. When a child at kindergarten asked what he makes, his own child answered “gold,” and he let the metaphor stand. In a moral economy, durable, accessible paths are a kind of treasure. There are plans on the table that widen the horizon beyond tiles. The problem of diapers, absorbents and fabric choking landfills, has him thinking of extraction for irrigation and reuse as insulation, the way he’s heard it done in Korea. He wants a nursery for seedlings paired with recycling, a small proof that new life can grow where we refuse decay. He talks about responsibilities, not punishments, about how rules zigzag and yet people can be taught to care for what lies underfoot. He tells young founders with disabilities to “plan carefully, learn to assess risks,” and tells those denied once not to curl inward: try again, ask for help, document better. He tells officials that recycling doesn’t mean inferior, and tells buyers that cheap means paying twice. He tells his children that trash is a resource misnamed.

If you listen long enough, the inner architecture of Tolyq Adam reveals itself without exposition. Andrey keeps learning because certainty without knowledge calcifies; he keeps showing up because knowledge without discipline dissolves; he keeps centering usefulness because discipline without compassion corrodes. He is not interested in pity or sainthood; he is interested in a city where a blind man can walk to a library on tactile tile that does not break in three winters, where a schoolchild can feel a ribbed path through a crowded courtyard, where a truck full of bottles becomes a courtyard that drains, a curb that does not crumble, a cemetery lane that does not wash away with the first thaw. He wants institutions that mentor rather than merely measure; he wants procurement that counts lifespan, not just unit price; he wants workshops in which people with and without disabilities work side by side because at the press, labels do not hold a wrench. He says success is being useful. In the register of impact, usefulness is not small. It lives in the district hospital’s entrance where a cane tip clicks and knows where to go; in the social protection office where a visitor feels the studded warning underfoot before the steps; in the cultural center where the new tiles run straight and true; in a library named for Tolstoy, where literature meets a textured line of equal access. It lives in the sacks of plastic his children carry and the patience with which he explains that 50 tons of plastic is twenty train cars if you don’t compress it, that recycling is not a gesture but an industry, that there is always enough waste to work with if only we choose not to waste people.

“Either you do something yourself,” he says, “or decisions are made behind your back.” And so he does: presses tile, files patents, trains lifts, answers schoolchildren, shows inspectors what a working body looks like when it moves by touch and reason, keeps writing letters and filling forms and asking for the mentorship that might make the next founder’s path straighter. There is nothing declarative in his shop; only the declarative memory of a culture that used everything, honored labor, and understood that dignity is not given, it is practiced, square by square, until the city learns to feel it underfoot.

Their resilience, their refusal to fall into ignorance, laziness, or bitterness, the three vices Abai warns against, shows their commitment to living truthfully and purposefully. They strive, as Abai instructs, to act with purity of intention, using the gifts given to them not for personal glory but to uplift others. Their artistry becomes a form of gratitude; their perseverance, a form of worship; their brotherhood, a manifestation of the compassionate humanity Abai sees as the path closest to the Most High. In this way, the brothers’ lives stand as a quiet but powerful embodiment of Word Thirty Eight’s central message: that true elevation comes from aligning one’s inner world with reason, justice, and heartfelt love; that work done with sincerity becomes prayer; and that gratitude expressed through creative action becomes a form of faith that dignifies both the individual and the community.

In the northern city of Kostanay, where winters bite deeply and summers arrive with a soft warmth, four brothers grew up learning that life would never be simple, but that simplicity is not what makes a life meaningful. The Ankauov brothers — Sarsen, Dauren, Arlan, and Baglan — were born into a family where creativity flowed as naturally as breath, and where the values of Qazaq culture shaped every corner of their childhood. Their disability, Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), came slowly, like a long shadow, weakening muscles year by year. But in their home, weakness was never the main story. What defined them instead was upbringing, layered with love, responsibility, and the quiet, steady expectation that each child holds a gift meant for the world. Their father, a shepherd, musician, craftsman, and philosopher in his own quiet way, was the first to see the artistic flame in his children. He taught through example: rising before dawn, planning work with precision, preparing for winter, repairing what needed repair, and never tolerating laziness. “Creativity is within you,” he often told them, noticing Arlan’s early passion for drawing, Baglan’s thirst for knowledge, Sarsen’s natural leadership, and Dauren’s silent, meticulous mastery of leatherwork. He guided each child according to their nature—mind, heart, and will—woven into the fabric of everyday life long before the brothers ever encountered Abai’s philosophy in books.

Their mother, raised by her grandmother, carried the ancestral art of carpet weaving in her hands. As a little girl, she watched the loom rhythmically rise and fall, absorbing every gesture without realizing she was storing a map of memory. Many years later, in 2016, after her sons had built their studio, those memories returned to her “as if awakened from the past,” she said. She took out the loom inherited from her mother-in-law and began weaving again, joining the work alongside her sons, a living example of how tradition never truly disappears, just sleeps until someone is ready to revive it. Childhood for the brothers was not easy. Their diagnosis came gradually, weak muscles, tired legs, falling more than other children. Sarsen remembers the day he first realized something was changing: “One day I could run with my friends, and the next, I couldn’t keep up. My legs didn’t listen to me the same way.” There were moments of staring at classmates’ curious or mocking faces, moments of falling in the schoolyard and children misunderstanding, thinking they were drunk or clumsy. “In childhood, kids can be cruel,” Arlan said. “But our father raised us to stand up for ourselves. Spirit doesn’t fall, even if the body does.” Despite these hardships, the boys grew in a home filled with respect, discipline, and unconditional support. When the father passed away, the eldest brother, Sarsen, stepped into his place almost naturally. He had been the closest to their father’s discipline, understanding, and strategic mind. “When father taught me to plan the winter, I did not know then that he was teaching me about life,” he says. Later, these lessons became the backbone of their entrepreneurial work.

Their entrepreneurial path did not begin with a grand plan, but with a simple realization: they could not depend on anyone else. Their health required flexibility, some days they could stand longer, some days they couldn’t; some days the pain in their back or legs demanded rest. Regular employment had no room for such unpredictability. “When you work for someone,” Baglan explained, “you must be there from nine to evening, sick or not. For us, that wasn’t possible. When you work for yourself, you can adjust, but more importantly, you can maintain your dignity.” The idea began like a spark. Arlan experimented with leftover wool from carpets at home, playing with textures, combining colors, searching for something unseen before. He had studied interior design, but his technique, appliqué from sheep’s wool, was entirely self-invented. “I tried everything,” he said. “I experimented until I found the highest-quality method.” He created a painting whose surface looked like it was painted, yet was made entirely of wool, soft to the eye, firm to the touch. The brothers immediately recognized its potential.

From this spark, they built a collective vision. Their eldest brother pushed them gently but firmly: “We must create something of our own, something Qazaq. A brand.” Together, they refined the technique until it became a fully patented, worldrecognized method, received first in 2012, then confirmed again in 2016. “There is no analogue,” Arlan says. “Words can’t explain it—you must see it.” Their trademark soon attracted attention. Locals and foreigners alike were drawn to the paintings, each one carrying Qazaq motifs, ornaments, and textures that could be both touched and felt emotionally. People bought them for homes, for gifts, for cultural exhibitions. Foreign visitors saw in them a rare glimpse into Qazaq spirit, modesty, dignity, beauty, and the lingering presence of nomadic memory. But the business grew not only from creativity; it grew from necessity, unity, and shared resilience. “We helped each other,” Arlan said. “One alone could not do it. But together, we had abilities and strengths.” Each brother found his place. Arlan led artistic production, Dauren crafted leatherworks with unmatched precision, Sarsen handled planning and economic strategy, and Baglan wrote texts, prepared documents, did research, organized exhibitions, and studied SMM and technology to support their public presence.

resence. Their disability shaped the path but did not limit the destination. They learned to balance health with work: carrying paintings through rain and snow, driving long distances from the village to the city for exhibitions, sometimes falling, sometimes hurting, yet never giving up. “People look at me and say, ‘You look healthy,’” Arlan shared once. “But they don’t know. Still, I try not to judge them. People can’t see what you carry inside.” Their efforts were eventually recognized at national and international levels. A breakthrough came in 2018 at a major forum in Petropavlovsk attended by President Nazarbayev and President Putin. Despite being told he wasn’t allowed to stand next to the official displays, Sarsen insisted on staying. His quiet determination caught the attention of high-level officials, including representatives from the Prime Minister’s Office. This recognition led to exhibitions at the National Museum in Astana, sponsorship from philanthropist Nurlan Smagulov, and, after eight long years of waiting, the brothers finally received two apartments in the city. “Support like that changes everything,” they say. “It allows you to breathe.” Their work reached beyond Qazaqstan as well. Arlan was selected to participate in a month-long festival in Abu Dhabi, presenting his paintings to sheikhs and artists from across the Muslim world. He still remembers the warmth, the cultural exchange, and the feeling of representing Qazaq artistry on an international stage.

Throughout all these achievements, the brothers remained deeply grounded in Qazaq values: mutual assistance, humility, respect for elders, and the belief that craft is not simply work but a form of spiritual continuity. Their mother’s revival of carpet weaving inspired them to teach children traditional arts. Today, they provide free masterclasses for children aged 7 to 18, explaining ornaments, history, and cultural meaning. “Art is a language,” Arlan says. “A painting can speak without words.” Through teaching, they preserve what might otherwise be lost. The brothers are now building a franchise model for children’s studios across Qazaqstan. They dream that their technology, their style, and their philosophy will spread to other cities. “We have 14 years of experience,” Baglan says. “Everything is prepared. Now we just need a push.”

Barriers still remain, banks hesitate to loan to disabled entrepreneurs; infrastructure is inadequate for people using canes; support programs have disappeared. “But Qazaq people are becoming more tolerant,” Baglan says. “Society is changing, slowly.” Reflecting on Abai’s philosophy, the brothers find deep resonance. They are especially drawn to Abai’s 33rd Word about craft, how craft may disappear from the world, but never from the soul. They see themselves in that description: masters who live not for vanity, but for the work itself. “A master is also a philosopher,” Baglan says. “He must remain humble and strong.” When asked what advice they would give others with disabilities, their words come softly but with strength. “Believe in your ability,” Arlan says. “Everyone has inner potential.” Baglan adds, “Support is the most important thing. One cannot fight alone.” Sarsen’s message carries the weight of a father-like voice: “Move step by step. Don’t fear difficulties. Work with what you have. Everything grows gradually.” Looking back, they say they would not change anything. “Everything happened naturally,” Arlan reflects. “Slowly, together.” Their dream is simple yet profound: that their art lives beyond them, that their patented technique continues in future generations, that the children they teach today will become tomorrow’s masters. “We are guests in this life,” they say, echoing Abai. “What we leave behind — that is what remains."

Their disability shaped their bodies, but not their spirit. Their unity shaped their identity. Their work shaped their purpose. And their hearts shaped the path they continue to walk, four brothers, bound not by weakness, but by strength, creativity, and the quiet, enduring dignity of the Tolyq Adam.

Arnur Iskakov was born in the wide, quiet spaces of Abai district near Semey, a place where the horizon stretches like a promise. His childhood rhythms included school by day and village gatherings by night. But the heart of his earliest fascination was his grandfather’s small rural theater, a simple stage where neighbors transformed into kings and poets the moment a sheet of fabric rose as a curtain. Creativity lived in that family without needing a formal introduction. At school, Arnur was drawn to the stage. He was the student who volunteered for concerts, who sang and danced freely. Still, when it came time to choose a profession, he followed a different dream: “My dream was to become a therapist, a practicing physician,” he says. Medicine felt respectable, a path of service and stability. Creativity would remain a passion, but not a profession.

For five years he studied diligently, nights filled with textbooks, days filled with jokes and improvised skits that made classmates laugh. He imagined a predictable future in a white coat. But early in his sixth year, everything abruptly changed. An accident left him with a spinal injury and dependent on a wheelchair, “more than ten years now,” he adds quietly. Suddenly, the plan dissolved. In addition to the physical trauma, he faced a harsh shift in society’s gaze, a postSoviet assumption that disability means invisibility, dependence, and staying home on a pension. He felt a clash inside between aqyl (mind) asking what comes next, jurek (heart) craving meaning, and qairat (will) refusing to give up. “This will not define my life,” he told himself. He stepped away from medical school and began reconstructing a future that could still hold purpose. His first professional steps after the injury led him into politics, to “Jas Otan” the youth wing of the “Amanat” (then “Nur-Otan” party. There, he found a way to channel his desire to help others like him. He launched Kederğisiz keleșek (Future Without Barriers), a project still active today. “I created this project,” he says without pride, but with conviction

The work reignited his creative flame. He transitioned from politics to radio, hosting programs at Astana radio, and then to television, followed by filmmaking. He even created a movie about his own transformation, titled Life After… Media became his method of showing that life after trauma is not a dead end, but a different kind of script. The idea of an inclusive theater did not arrive suddenly. It formed gradually from the dust-filled backstage memories of his grandfather’s theater, the advocacy for people with disabilities, and his work in media. The key turning point came in 2018, when he helped organize the first international festival of special theaters in Qazaqstan. Watching performers who were deaf, blind, or in wheelchairs take the stage with power and confidence made something inside him say: “This must exist here not once a year, but every day.” Thus was born “Qanattylar” (Those with Wings). He had already begun planning in 2017, but the festival solidified his resolve. He pushed forward with proposals, negotiations, and perseverance. The Zhasstar Theater welcomed his idea, and Qazaqstan gained its first state-backed inclusive theater, founded and led by a person living with disability.

Today, the theater has around fifty members, more than half of whom are “special people,” as Arnur calls them, actors with different forms of disability who work alongside able-bodied professionals. Their repertoire includes dramatic and autobiographical productions, as well as a children’s performance entirely in sign language. When the lights dim and the curtain rises, Arnur’s belief becomes visible: disability is not a deficit, it is a different way of expressing life. This work, however, demands strength beyond creativity. He handles administration and directing: “I do both,” he says, “but of course the creative side is closer to my heart.” Yet a constant challenge remains: “In Qazaqstan, there are still no specialized programs for special actors or directors.” Rehearsals involve not only teaching theater, but re-teaching belief in oneself. The barriers he faces are not mainly about steps or doors. “The main thing is understanding and attitude,” he emphasizes. Ramps matter, but respect matters more. Too often, he still hears attitudes rooted in Soviet legacies: people with disabilities should “stay home,” be passive recipients of pity.

He deeply rejects this idea. “Inclusion is not about pity, it’s about equality,” he says. He dislikes even the word “disabled.” “We are all people. Everyone should contribute.” He has also observed fragmentation within the disability community, separate organizations for the deaf, the blind, wheelchair users, each operating on islands of struggle. “We have the same problems: housing, education, employment. Why not unite?” His theater is his answer, a collective of wings moving in one direction. But even the wings get tired. “Yes, right now is exactly such a period,” he admitted during the interview, his face revealing fatigue. Burnout forms quietly, through endless paperwork, limited support systems, and the emotional labor of holding others’ hopes. What lifts him? “My wife. She always advises and supports me.” And simple things: music, nature, a sauna, silence. “Sometimes I just need rest.” He draws philosophical guidance from Abai, where mind, heart, and will negotiate balance. “They come to unity,” he says, a unity reflected in his own life: mind that strategizes, heart that cares for “special people’s” dignity, and a will that refuses to surrender.

His values have transformed. “Before, it was important just to earn money,” he reflects. “Now success is having a good wife and a job you really enjoy.” Spiritual calmness has replaced material ambition. He lives more fully now, not despite the wheelchair, but through what he has created from it. Arnur continues to dream. Short-term: a permanent building for the theater. Long-term: a cultural development center for people with special needs, not just theater, but film, music, training, and opportunities for social participation. “If I continue entrepreneurship,” he says, “it will be in the media, something that inspires and has meaning.” He is already shaping a new narrative of entrepreneurship, one rooted in purpose, not profit. Every time a child sees a fairy tale signed on stage, or an adult sees a wheelchair user performing a monologue, the story of disability in Qazaqstan shifts. Well-being for Arnur is not ease. It is equilibrium, waking each day and choosing creation over bitterness. He still confronts discrimination, exhaustion, and a world not designed for wheels. But he carries peace: “to live and enjoy life, no matter what.” When asked whether he would change anything in his past, he answers simply, “No. No regrets.” The accident that disrupted his plans also uncovered a deeper calling: to build spaces where others like him can rise, shine, and be applauded. Through “Qanattylar” ( (Those with Wings), Arnur Iskakov has become a quiet force of social imagination, proving that “special people” do not need pity or permission. They need a stage. And wings.

When Asiya Tikeeva remembers the young woman she was twenty years ago, newly moved to Astana, she sees someone who was hungry for independence. She had worked in different companies, observed how people built structures around themselves, understood the rules of the game, and one day felt a quiet conviction rise inside her: “I could work for myself.” That simple thought, calm, confident, almost casual, became the beginning of her first entrepreneurial life. She founded a real estate agency, assembled a strong team, worked tirelessly, and tasted the exhilaration of earning well by her own effort. Those years were busy ones, filled with negotiation, paperwork, clients, the thrill of deals closing, and the steady rhythm of a career taking shape. But life, in its deepest lessons, does not arrive in business meetings. It arrives as a child.

When her daughter Madina was born, everything she understood about time, work, and herself shifted. The moment that should have been sacred, the first hours after birth, collapsed under words she still remembers verbatim, because they pierced into the softest part of her being: “Mommy, your child has Down syndrome. Better to leave her here, or take her far away so no one sees her.” The room swayed. The world blurred. What she had carried for nine months with tenderness was suddenly presented as something shameful, burdensome, unworthy of a family. The postpartum depression came like a wave with no edges. Hospitals followed one after another, heart surgery, oncology, a battle with cancer that lasted five years. She remembers crying constantly, as if tears were the only language available. “It seemed like life was over,” she says. And there is no metaphor in that sentence. For a long time, she could not give a speech at family gatherings without breaking down. Everything inside her felt unfinished, raw, and unbearably heavy.

But even in the worst years, one element of her identity survived, “the knowledge that she could earn.” She knew how to create, how to build, how to work. Sitting at home doing nothing was impossible; work had always been part of her sense of dignity. But Madina’s condition demanded constancy. She could no longer live in a 24/7 business rhythm. She needed a profession that could exist beside caregiving, not against it. So she began searching again. She studied franchises, took trainings, looked for fields where competence mattered more than presence in an office. Eventually she found certification work, enrolled in courses, and became a certification expert. Slowly, quietly, without dramatic announcements, she built a new business around her laptop and her phone. “Now I can work from anywhere,” she says. She hired assistants, delegated tasks, and learned to create a business that matched her life, not the other way around. But something else began to take shape. As her practical life stabilized, something inside her began to reorganize itself. Abai would call it the alignment of heart, mind, will. Asiya did not call it anything. She simply lived it. Acceptance did not arrive suddenly. It came years later, when Madina was in first grade. They were walking in the city, passing a mosque, when a new feeling surged through her, clean and unexpected: pride. Pride that this was her child. Pride that she had been entrusted with something sacred. Pride that she no longer needed to hide from the stares of strangers on buses or in cafés. “I realized that I wasn’t ashamed anymore,” she says. “And that the Almighty had entrusted this child to me.” And then came the most important insight of her life, a sentence she repeats to mothers even today:

That acceptance became the beginning of purpose. She joined parent chats. She met Aizhan Alzhanova and Gulsum Semyonova, mothers of daughters the same age, with the same diagnosis. At first they spoke about therapy, schools, doctors, paperwork, and the everyday labyrinth mothers of children with disabilities must navigate. But another question slowly formed: “What about the mothers themselves? Who helps them? Who teaches them to survive their own pain? Who gives them the tools to rebuild their lives?” They searched for psychological support methods, shared readings, attended trainings, talked to each other late at night. What began as a small mothers’ circle became a place of mutual holding, a space where someone could cry without shame and also plan without fear. Over time, the support group transformed into something larger, more structured, more intentional. By 2017, it became a public foundation, “Mama Pro.” Today “Mama Pro” has touched more than 5,000 women in Qazaqstan. There are training centers in Astana and Almaty, branches in regions from Kostanay to UstKamenogorsk, and a national network of nearly 30 staff. Most are mothers of children with disabilities themselves, women who walked into the room once with broken sleep and broken confidence, completed a training, healed, learned, and then stayed to help others.

When Asiya describes the mothers who arrive on day one, she paints a recognizable portrait: women with heavy emotional states; women in clothes that hide rather than express; women who haven’t washed their hair because there is no energy left; women whose backgrounds are full of exhaustion, guilt, confusion, and the silent dread of the future. “Their eyes are empty,” she says quietly. “Just empty.” But after two or three weeks of psychological support, something changes. The gaze lifts. The spine straightens. Interest returns. Possibility returns. A month later, the same women come with neat hair, lipstick, and laughter that doesn’t crack in the throat. In three months they feel like different people, not because “life became easy,” but because they are no longer drowning in it.

Asiya’s philosophy is clear: the path is twofold. First emotional rehabilitation, then economic activation. A woman cannot calculate unit economics when she has not slept or when she is crying through every slide. She cannot write a grant application when she feels unworthy of success. She cannot choose a niche when she feels life has chosen against her. But once she stands on firmer emotional ground, something miraculous happens, her mind sharpens, her will returns, and she begins to dream again in the language of action. “Mama Pro” helps her choose a niche compatible with caregiving. Helps her test demand without capital. Helps her learn cost margins, SMM, packaging, procurement portals, government grants. The foundation teaches how to start with nothing, a kitchen, a phone, a small batch, and build from there. And because each woman begins from necessity, not privilege, the work they build tends to be grounded, practical, and sustainable. Asiya has thousands of examples, but some remain in her heart like sacred markers of what human resilience looks like.

There is Shynar, who came home from the maternity hospital to her motherin-law’s words: “Don’t enter this house. We don’t need a child like that.” Who then lived five years in near isolation. When she joined “Mama Pro,” she could not say “My name is Shynar” without crying. Today she owns a production facility, a brand, a stable business, and a future she built line by line, grant by grant, refusal by refusal, comeback by comeback. When a commission tried to dismiss her, “give others a chance,” she walked out crushed, then remembered what she learned at “Mama Pro,” turned around, and fought for her rights. She won. There is Anara, mother of three adult children with disabilities, who entered the psychological course exhausted beyond words. Months later she wrote: “Asiya, remember what I was like when I first came?” Today she is married again, living with joy she once believed impossible. “I never thought I could just be a happy woman,” she told Asiya. There is a mother of a child with celiac disease who navigated family tensions to build a gluten-free semi-finished foods line that serves her son’s needs and honors her own dream. A quiet triumph, no banners, no speeches, just dignity restored.

And there is Saltanat Kaleyeva, who once wished for “five speech therapists.” Today she runs two rehabilitation centers serving more than 250 children with severe disabilities, entirely free, under full state support. Her journey shows that personal struggle can unfurl into public infrastructure, that pain can turn into policy, and that caregiving can grow into community architecture. Asiya’s work sits at the intersection of survival and purpose. Her foundation does not romanticize struggle. It does not package mothers as heroes. It teaches how to ask for help without shame, how to bring relatives into care rather than resent them, how to build businesses without abandoning the child’s needs, and how to find a pace that is both human and sustainable. “Mama Pro” is not only a women’s initiative. Fathers participate too; the “Papa Pro” program works with men who, like mothers, must learn, adjust, and heal. The Siblings project now supports brothers and sisters of children with disabilities, protecting their mental health and teaching families to speak openly about diagnosis without fear. If you ask Asiya to describe her work in formal terms, she says: “Emotional rehabilitation and economic activation of families raising children with disabilities.” But in what she calls “living language,” it is this:

Her journey, from depression to acceptance, from isolation to leadership, from necessity to purpose, embodies the slow flowering of the Tolyq Adam. She rebuilt herself not in sudden revelation, but in steady acts of will; she opened her heart not only to her child but to thousands of women; she used her intellect to build systems, structures, and tools that now hold families across a nation. Asiya’s work is not only entrepreneurship. It is repair. It is dignity returned. It is unity restored. And in that unity,mothers, fathers, siblings, teachers, policymakers, strangers who become allies, lies the echo of Abai’s wisdom: one person’s strength, when shared, becomes a whole community’s blessing.

When Aymana Moldabekova talks about her childhood, she remembers two homes, two worlds. She was born into a full family in northern Qazaqstan, but life quickly took a different turn. “My grandmother took me in for what was supposed to be just a month,” she says with a soft smile. “But I ended up staying with her for life.” Her grandmother raised her in Almaty, the city that would become the birthplace of her dreams, her self-discovery, and her bold entrance into the world. She was a child who noticed everything, how people looked at her missing hand, how she felt different. “I had a prosthetic, but it was heavy, uncomfortable, and got dirty easily,” she recalls. “As a girl, this made me feel unattractive.” Children can be unfiltered, and she learned early how deeply society treats visible differences. Yet even then, something inside her persisted, a quiet ember of self-belief waiting to ignite.

Her grandmother was her anchor, the person who taught her to walk into life with grace and strength. Genetics, she often jokes, gave them both flawless skin, “People always commented about how my grandmother didn’t have a single wrinkle at 100.” But what Aymana inherited most was resilience, a soulful mix of aqyl (mind), zhurek (heart), and what would one day become her superpower: qairat (will). School could be lonely. She hid behind silence, defending herself against curious stares and questions that stung more than anyone knew. “I was very reserved,” she says. “I didn’t want to put myself out there.” But university changed everything. In university, surrounded by new people with bigger dreams, she began testing her own courage. She became a class representative, took on projects, worked jobs that pushed her into the world. She met entrepreneurs, ambitious, self-driven, and something inside her woke up. “Their work inspired me,” she says. For the first time, she saw a life beyond hiding. But the defining shift came when she stepped into modeling, first in Qazaqstan, where she was rejected. “They didn’t want me,” she admits, the memory sharp but not bitter. Then came Moscow. Then Istanbul, where everything transformed. “In Istanbul, I achieved great results,” she says, her eyes brightening. There, her difference didn’t make her lesser, it made her unforgettable. Her Asian features stood out. Her prosthetic arm made designers pause, not out of pity, but admiration. She didn’t need to fit the mold; she became the mold. She began to craft a new identity. “I embodied the image of a cyborg woman,” she says, proudly. Not a victim, not someone needing sympathy, but a futuristic figure standing defiantly against limitations. She styled herself in latex suits and sharp silhouettes. She made the metallic lines of her prosthetic part of an aesthetic, a statement. “Why be like everyone else?” she would think. “That’s boring.” She turned what society labels as “defect” into an attention-grabbing artistic edge. Confidence, once fragile, expanded until it sparkled into something powerful.

Her disability was no longer something to hide, it became her storytelling voice. When she returned to Qazaqstan in 2019, she was on fire. “I wanted to prove that I was worthy,” she says. She bought a smartphone with a good camera and began photographing women, not just their bodies, but the parts of themselves they had forgotten to love. “They would say, ‘Wow, I didn’t know I was this beautiful!’ That’s what fills me with joy,” she says. Her philosophy is simple: beauty is not something to earn, it is something to reveal. She built her business organically, through Instagram, through energy exchange, through the art of seeing others fully. She registered as a selfemployed entrepreneur. She organized posing workshops, modeling events, collaborations with global brands like Samsung. She stood on both sides of the camera, subject and creator, making the spaces she entered bend to include her.

And yet, entrepreneurship is never a straight runway. Her life is shaped by intensity, periods of nonstop hustle, followed by collapse. “I’m a creative person,” she explains. “I struggle with consistency.” The very spontaneity that fuels her creativity also exhausts her. When she burned out at 27, after political unrest, global crises, and losing her beloved grandmother, she pushed herself deeper into work instead of grieving. “My project failed, and I had to return the investment,” she says. “It was the biggest burnout I’ve ever had.” The financial pressure suffocated, but the emotional pressure nearly broke her. Only nearly. She clawed her way back through therapy, through walking, through yoga, through lying in hammocks in Istanbul under forgiving sunlight. She rebuilt herself with every breath, reconnecting mind and heart, the mind that plans and the heart that feels. “Now, I’m working on balance,” she says. “I want to grow steadily and comfortably.” She no longer needs armor to feel powerful. She no longer wears her prosthetic just to silence pity, now she wears it only when she chooses. “Sometimes, I even forget I don’t have a hand,” she laughs lightly. And when she goes into meetings bare-armed, she does it to remind herself that her worth exists without props. What used to be a wound is now a crown she can put on or take off. Her identity did not fracture because of disability, it expanded. Entrepreneurship also became a space where she could shape her own truth about inclusion.

Instead of limiting her, it amplified her uniqueness. She collaborated on inclusive fashion shows, created content that made disability visible without victimhood. She reminds others, “People with disabilities who achieve success don’t fixate on their condition.” Not denial, transcendence. She is passionate about women’s spaces, storytelling, and representation. “I want a women’s community,” she says. “A place where women can come together, and no one is labeled as ‘this kind of woman’ or ‘that kind of woman.’” A two-story creative hub in her imagination, filled with women who grow together, not compete. Her business dreams are not just about income. “Money is secondary,” she says. “I’m more of a spiritual person.” Purpose matters. Transformation matters. The way a woman looks at herself afterward, that matters most. She likes competition, healthy, inspirational. She likes the feeling of watching someone succeed and thinking: I can reach that too. She sees independence not as rejection of help, but freedom from dependency. “If you want to achieve something, you have to do something for it,” she says. “Success is in your own hands, literally or not.”

There were moments when she considered traditional employment, stability, routine, but she realized she does not thrive in cages. Her creativity demands flexibility, mobility, bursts of genius followed by sacred rest. “I’m introverted,” she says. “I need time to recharge.” And she honors that now. She sees rest not as weakness but as renewal, a new form of wellness and inner well-being. Throughout her journey, friendship has been essential. “My friends supported me the most,” she says. “Emotionally, morally, even practically.” Her friend Zhulzhan became a mirror of strength during dark nights: reminding her who she is, pushing her to rise again. She learned that support is not dependency, it is community. Her grandmother’s passing remains her deepest sorrow, but even grief taught her resilience. Loss stripped away illusions and left her with clarity: life is fragile, ambitions must be lived now, not “someday.” She wants to lead women toward joy, not perfection.

Her vision for the future is not small. She wants to tell women’s stories, not only the glossy ones that land covers, but the raw ones that carry truth. Women without children at 35. Women who can’t pay employees one month. Women who are still searching. Women who exist beyond success metrics. Stories that hug, not judge. Her disability was never an obstacle, it was a frontier. A portal. An invitation into a life she created from her own brilliance. It helped her cultivate a worldview that resonates deeply with Abai’s teaching: strength is not loud; it is lived. Dignity is not ordinary; it is earned through self-respect. Knowledge comes from experience, and the fullness of a person, the Tolyq Adam, emerges when mind, heart and will are in harmony. She found her willpower in the fire of proving herself. She found her heart in lifting other women. She found her mind in learning how to rebuild after falling. Now, at 29, she is entering a new chapter, one where she no longer performs confidence just to feel it, but embodies it from within. She is building a life where work supports well-being, not consumes it. Where she is surrounded by women who challenge and inspire her. Where she rises without needing to fight shadows anymore. She has fully accepted herself, and that acceptance radiates outward, shaping how others see her too. “If you feel comfortable with yourself,” she says, “society will mirror that back to you.”

Her disability does not define her, but she defines what disability can look like in Qazaqstan: futuristic, bold, magnetic, unafraid. She is not just creating a business. She is creating belonging. She is not just photographing women. She is helping them see their own beauty. She is not just modeling difference. She is advancing what beauty itself means. She is the first cyborg model from Qazaqstan, and she owns that title proudly. She will grow, scale, and build communities. She will raise families and create safe spaces. She will travel between Almaty and Istanbul and wherever her dreams pull her. She will continue to turn what others fear into the thing that makes her unstoppable. She once wanted to prove she belonged. Now she knows she leads.

Bakytgul Adiyatkyzy’s narrative begins not with business ambition, but with the quiet rupture of a life-long career in education. “Due to my health, I had to undergo surgery on my leg. I had to leave the pedagogical field I’d been working in all my life.”

The profession that once gave her meaning, standing before students, tirelessly active from dawn to dusk, became inaccessible when walking itself grew difficult. After surgery, confined to a wheelchair for three months, she recalls: “Believe me, for someone who’s always been out in society, sitting at home all day is unbearable.”

But even in stillness, her will stirred. That stirring, what Abai would call qairat (will), was the first ember of her entrepreneurial journey. Refusing to remain idle, she cleared a room in her three-room apartment and opened a mini-pekarnya (home bakery).

“I told my husband, bring me two sacks of flour,” she laughs, “From one sack, I made 200 flatbreas), and from two — 400. We sold them all in two and a half days.”

What started as a modest home-based venture quickly evolved. When she moved to Astana, the business scaled from serving 10–12 local stores to supplying 50+ outlets. She rose at 3am to make deliveries by 8–9am, offering hot bread a detail she proudly describes as her business’s fishka (signature touch): “The secret was delivering them hot. People waking up early for breakfast loved it.”

But behind this growth was silent sacrifice. She and her daughter baked through the night while her husband handled delivery.

“It was adskii trud. No rest days.”

Eventually, her body rebelled. “Working with a hot oven all the time began to affect my throat. My health collapsed again. I had to stop.”

This moment, a convergence of exhaustion, physical breakdown, and introspection, marked psychological rupture. Bakytgul names it plainly: “I think I burned out because I didn’t understand how to run a business properly. I didn’t trust anyone with the recipe. I wanted to do everything myself.”

Her realization came only after attending the TalpynUp program, which she calls a turning point:

“I realized I was doing everything in the red zone. I was ignoring my health, ignoring my family.”

Like many Qazaqs shaped by the post-Soviet ethos of resilience-through-suffering, she had internalized the idea that worth comes only through toil. In this, Abai’s warning rings clear:

“Hold together your mind, will, and heart. Then, you will be whole — different from the rest.”

TalpynUp didn’t just teach business, it reoriented her aqyl (mind), realigned her jurek (heart), and recalibrated her qairat (will).

“After studying there, I understood so many mistakes I had made. Before that, I just kept doing, without tracking anything … no bookkeeping, no accounting. I didn’t even realize how harmful that was.”

The shift from reactive survival to proactive strategy had begun.

Yet her transformation wasn’t only technical. It was existential. “After I entered entrepreneurship, my whole way of thinking changed. When your environment changes, your mindset does too.” This moment of self-reclamation, reframing identity through enterprise, sits at the heart of her journey.

Still, structural barriers loomed. “I applied for government subsidies three times, every time I was rejected.” For Bakytgul, the lack of systemic support for people with disabilities in Qazaqstan is not just an inconvenience. It’s a source of deep sorrow.

“There’s not a single advantage for us. Thinking about that really hurts.”

And yet, she persisted, not from privilege, but from principle.

“We used what little money we had, ordered an oven from Shymkent, and started the bakery from our home. My family supported me financially and emotionally.”

Support from the state may have been absent, but solidarity emerged elsewhere. At TalpynUp, she found not only knowledge but kinship:

“I met so many women running businesses. For example, Mahabbat from Kostanay helped me a lot … with grants, taxes, accounting. I learned so much from her.”

Now, she is preparing for a new chapter: a meat business. “After we closed the bakery, my husband bought some horses with the money we had saved. Now he’s raising them, and we’re preparing to open a meat shop in Astana.”

But this time, she says, “I’ve learned to think differently. Now I plan to delegate, to rest, to spend time with my family. You can’t enjoy your business if it consumes you entirely.”

She has even found a new fishka (signature touch), a novel twist to differentiate herself in Qazaqstan’s competitive meat market.

“I’m confident I’ll succeed this time.”

In reflecting on what it means to be a successful entrepreneur, Bakytgul does not speak of revenue. She speaks of responsibility.

“I don’t say this just because I’m disabled, but we must bring benefit to society. When I see people in need, it hurts my heart. In the future, I want to do charity work.”

Bakytgul Adiyatkyzy embodies the spirit of Abai’s second word, the rejection of arrogance and the embrace of labour as the moral measure of a person. In the heat of her oven, she rediscovered humility, intellect, and compassion. By holding together mind, heart and will, she became, in Abai’s sense, Tolyq Adam, not flawless, but complete. Her wholeness was forged not in ease, but in the honest heat of work.

He often says that his life was not shaped by dreams of success, but by necessity itself. Born on May 4, 1971, in the small village of Kabyshakty in the Akzhaik District of West Qazaqstan, Birzhan Kuzhakov came into a world where responsibility arrived early. He was the eldest of four — two younger brothers, Yerzhan and Serzhan, and a younger sister, Gulzhiyan. When he was only seven, his father passed away at the age of thirty-one, leaving his mother alone to raise four children. Overnight, childhood became a duty. “My brothers and I got used to working hard and helping our mother from an early age,” he recalls. It was the first of many moments that would demand resilience. School ended in 1988, and between 1989 and 1991, he served in the Soviet Army. Returning home during the collapse of the Soviet Union, he found a land of chaos, factories closing, unemployment soaring, and a way of life dissolving. Like many young men of that time, he headed to the city to search for work, sleeping wherever he could, refusing to surrender to despair. “I wasn’t one to give up,” he says with a calm certainty that reveals the foundation of his character

In 1992, he managed to secure a job under the Ministry of Internal Affairs, first in the Department of State Guard and later with the traffic police. Wages often came in food coupons instead of money, but stability slowly formed. He even began studying law by correspondence and brought his mother to live with him, a moment that felt like the beginning of a better future. But life turned sharply in 2002. Birzhan lost his legs during his shift as a highway police officer in Uralsk when, on a freezing evening with temperatures at -40, the electricity went out in his guard trailer, along with the only source of heat. He couldn’t leave his post and had to wait for the shift change. He lost his legs to frostbite. He was only thirty-one. “My life turned upside down. Everything disappeared — confidence, meaning, hope.” The man who could run, serve, and provide suddenly faced absolute stillness. He remembers the lowest moment clearly, when living felt harder than dying. “Better to die than to beg on the street,” he told himself. The realization that many friends had vanished from his life only deepened the pain. “Only my brother Yerzhan stayed by my side. Without him, I probably wouldn’t have made it.”

Yet in that darkest hour, something sacred awakened. He made a vow:

After receiving prosthetics in Almaty, he returned to his hometown of Uralsk. His wife Ulpan supported him during this difficult time. The head of the traffic police gave him an opportunity, conducting vehicle inspections. That job kept the fire alive inside him. It reminded him that he still had skills, that society still needed him. Then, unexpectedly, a discarded piece of furniture changed everything. Qazaqstan was rebuilding itself in the early 2000s. Consumer goods were scarce, and foreign workers often threw away furniture with minor defects. One day, he picked up a small item, repaired it, and turned it into a TV stand. It was simple, but it sparked something dormant, his creativity. “I’m an artist by training. I’ve always loved drawing,” he explains. He placed the stand in his inspection office, and visitors began asking where he had bought it. When they learned he made it, someone offered to buy it. Then another. And another.

For the first time since the accident, he felt purpose, aqyl (mind) guiding imagination, jurek (heart) fueling courage. Entrepreneurship wasn’t a business decision, it was an act of self-reclamation. His younger brother Yerzhan soon joined him, leaving a well-paid job to build something meaningful together. They started small: shelves, tables, wardrobes. Demand was high because most households still had heavy Soviet furniture. They joined a business incubator, gained a workspace, sold near the market, and created local employment.

What began as survival turned into opportunity for others as well. But growth wasn’t simple. Banks wouldn’t give loans to people with disabilities. Social stigma lurked everywhere. Yet perseverance remained his compass. He brought young men from his village to the city, rented an apartment for them, and trained them from zero, teaching them not just a craft but a belief in themselves. Still, sustainability became a concern. Furniture isn’t purchased often, maybe once a decade. So he boldly shifted from retail to state tenders. Facing skepticism — “a disabled man with a tiny workshop” — he knocked on the doors of his home district, Akzhaik. They tested him with a modest order for a boarding school. He delivered on time, with quality. That first contract opened the door to schools, hospitals, and kindergartens across the region. A feature on Qazaqstan-Uralsk TV brought more recognition. His company began to grow into one of the few local producers of national-style furniture. He proved to himself, and to the society that doubted him, that disability did not diminish his leadership. In August 2023, he suffered two heart attacks in one day. Doctors said he might live six months to a year. Stress had spiked his blood sugar, further complicating surgery. But he survived again. “Allah is great,” he reflects. “If I am still here, it means I still have something good to do.”

Even reduced physical capacity did not stop him. His workshop continues to operate, and he focuses heavily on social impact, especially supporting people with disabilities. “I wanted them to feel needed again, to work, to earn, to live like everyone else.” Before the pandemic, he had 35 employees, including 21 with disabilities. Even now, with only ten workers, seven of them are also disabled. His social mission became central when he discovered that children with cerebral palsy, autism, and Down syndrome had almost no access to verticalization devices, standing frames that help them build strength and mobility. These devices were imported and expensive. He did not accept that children’s futures should depend on foreign supply chains. Over five painstaking years, gathering documents, passing certification exams, he and his brother registered 34 types of standing frames. And then they did something extraordinary: they donated hundreds of them to families who could never afford them. “When I see a child stand up and smile for the first time … that’s my biggest reward.” Between 2015 and 2023, they produced and gifted 365 devices, including 201 within West Qazaqstan alone. If that isn’t jurek (heart), what is? He also began supporting sensory rooms, Montessori equipment, and creative workshops for women with disabilities, a sewing studio that became a sanctuary of confidence and companionship.

He measures success not by revenue but by human transformation:“Success is when a person goes through hardship and doesn’t give up.” He lives this daily as a father as well. With five children, three daughters and two sons, every achievement becomes shared. His eldest daughter runs a clinic; his younger daughter is the company’s chief accountant; his son is studying under a Presidential scholarship; his two younger children still attend school. They grew up seeing their father’s willpower shape reality. His health struggles changed his philosophy. “Illness taught me humility,” he says quietly. “It made me turn to Allah.” He stopped rushing. He started feeling. He began protecting what truly matters: faith, family, purpose. In moments of exclusion, he confronts painful truths about society. “When I was active, everyone invited me … akims, TV, events. But now, after illness, silence. No calls. You become invisible.” His honesty reveals a continuing struggle: inclusion still hinges on productivity rather than dignity. Yet even when unseen, he continues to serve. Through every stage of his journey, he has preserved a deep love for Qazaq culture. His home is filled with handcrafted national-style furniture, each piece carrying ancient ornaments. He digitizes historical patterns to ensure they never fade from memory. “When children grow among such things, they know who they are and where they come from,” he says. Entrepreneurship is not only livelihood, it is cultural guardianship. He became an entrepreneur out of necessity. But it evolved into a calling of the soul.

Throughout his story, the harmony of aqyl (mind), jurek (heart), and qairat (will) pulses steadily, Abai’s Tolyq Adam embodied not in philosophy but in the living of life. His work lifted him from despair, restored control over his identity, and gave meaning to his suffering. It brought him from isolation to leadership, from loss to contribution. Looking to the future, even with fragile health, he dreams of opening a training center where he can teach at least ten people his craft, passing on not only skills but dignity. “I want people to remember us, to appreciate our work. That’s what matters most.” He has no regrets, not even about the accident. He learned that success is not measured in mobility, but in motion of the spirit.

Through abandonment, he discovered loyalty. Through pain, he found purpose. Through disability, he cultivated strength others cannot see. He is not merely surviving. He is shaping a more inclusive Qazaqstan, where a person’s worth is not defined by their body but by the light they bring to the world. And that is what real success looks like.

Dinara Kuzhgulova grew up with the sound of her azhe’s (grandmother) voice carrying through the house like a steady thread running through her childhood. “Gylym tappai maqtanba. Oryn tappai maktanba,” her grandmother would remind her, quoting Abai with the seriousness of someone handing down a moral inheritance.

Dinara did not fully grasp the depth of those words as a child, but they settled somewhere inside her, becoming a compass she would return to whenever life demanded clarity. Dinara always had a strong personality and never took “no” or “impossible” for an answer. The kind that meets difficulty with a tilted head and the question: What can I do with this? She always seeks solutions to problems, viewing them as opportunities for personal and professional growth. Today, she is a single mother raising two children, a woman living with complete blindness, and yet her life is filled with movement: entrepreneur, social advocate, athlete, mentor. She is a champion and prize-winner in several national and international judo tournaments and a passionate promoter of the rights of people with disabilities in her hometown, assisting others in landing a job. She helps others find purpose when they have nearly lost their own. Her story, however, begins long before the achievements.

As a child, Dinara knew she would one day lose her vision. An ophthalmologist warned that the world would grow dark within a decade or so. But the warning felt distant then, almost unreal. She chose to live her life fully. She graduated from a local college with a diploma in accounting and auditing and successfully worked in that field in various companies, including banks. Life moved forward. The darkness was not sudden, but its arrival left her navigating a world where every familiar object had changed shape. For nearly a year she fought for official recognition of her with a third-degree disability, a process as exhausting as it was necessary.

Dinara gratefully recalls that government support helped her survive her most difficult times. In 2017, she was left alone with two small children and no income. The local akimat (local authority) provided her with an opportunity to take courses in tailoring and design. Sewing and knitting had been her lifelong hobbies since the age of six, thanks to azhe [grandmother], and she already had a few returning customers. After completing the course, Dinara was able to open her own small, socially responsible tailoring workshop, “Qypshaq40 Style,” named after her family clan. For Dinara, her connection to Qazaq traditions and culture is deeply meaningful. Since her father had only daughters, she chose the family clan’s name for her business to honor and continue their heritage. As a social entrepreneur, Dinara helps people from vulnerable groups find employment through government subsidies and programs.

Her journey into entrepreneurship unfolded through necessity and courage. In 2017, unemployed and rejected repeatedly by employers who hesitated to hire a single mother, she turned to social support. The state covered six months of food and essential costs while she took part in “Bastau Business,” a free entrepreneurship programme. She applied for a government grant to buy professional equipment, was rejected, and applied again. By the time she completed the course, her persistence was rewarded. She received the grant. It transformed her life.

Finding a workplace was another challenge. Then kindness arrived in the form of local entrepreneur Marat Sadvakassov, who offered her a commercial space on favourable terms because he saw her situation clearly, her determination, her need, her potential. With that support, Dinara took her first real step into independence. Today, she employs seven seamstresses, all from vulnerable groups, many with disabilities of their own. The number fluctuates as workers need time for rehabilitation or medical treatment. Dinara has no interest in rigid rules or “standard hours.”

Her business grows year by year. She reinvests profits back into training, equipment, and improving conditions. People once advised her to give up entrepreneurship and return to a stable job with a small salary. She does not resent their doubts; instead, she says, “I’m grateful I heard their skepticism. It pushed me to rely on my own choices.” Deeply thankful for the help she received, from the government, from Marat, from her business manager, from relatives and her children, Dinara now feels a responsibility to pass that support forward. She teaches free tailoring courses to mothers with children with special needs and helps them find employment or open their own small ventures. “I hope I am helping people become self-sufficient and happier,” she says. Losing her eyesight in 2020 put her resilience to the test. She faced a choice, to give up and sell her business or to continue despite new challenges. Once again, she followed her heart and decided to move forward. She now believes that her blindness, while devastating, also became a source of strength that helped her achieve what she has today. At 43, Dinara entered studies for a bachelor’s degree in economics from Kostanai Regional University named after Akhmet Baitursynov. Her studies broadened her horizons and introduced her to inspiring people.

Sports have always been an important part of Dinara’s life. Her illness didn’t stop her, in fact, it opened a new chapter. Today, she is a decorated judo athlete, winning tournaments at various levels. Her entry into the sport was accidental: in 2021, her daughter found a newspaper ad from a local Paralympic sports organization recruiting visually impaired people for free judo lessons. Dinara decided to try it. Judo and daily training, she says, boosted her self-confidence and motivation to keep contributing to society. Her days are packed, so much so that she jokes about living “in her own time zone.” She emphasizes that without the help of her children and colleagues, her achievements would have taken much longer. When speaking about social barriers, Dinara notes that society often doesn’t know how to interact with people with disabilities. This leads to psychological isolation and exclusion. Beyond the lack of infrastructure, even simple tasks like riding a bus can be both physically and emotionally challenging. Society, she believes, is still learning to accept and include everyone.

She lost several friends, acquaintances, and employees due to her worsening illness but sees this as a “natural filter” for unnecessary relationships. She also notes that financial institutions often hesitate to give loans to people with disabilities, even though discrimination is officially prohibited. Dinara sincerely believes that society must care for everyone’s needs and be open to those with special requirements. “No one can be guaranteed protection from disability,” she says. “A compassionate, inclusive society is a stronger and more selfsufficient one. By ensuring inclusiveness society and every person will flourish.” Given her resilience, determination, and commitment to personal growth, Dinara has become a role model and inspiration for her colleagues, friends, and, most importantly, her children. She is respected and appreciated by local authorities and civil society for her contribution to improving the lives of people in need.

Her survival strategy, she says, is simple: set a goal, take it step by step, and treat obstacles as opportunities for growth. She shares this philosophy with her team. She advises social entrepreneurs to build flexibility into their operations, extra time for orders, adaptable schedules, clear task distribution. “A good manager must know what each employee does best and enjoys most,” she says. “Ask what they need to be happier and more productive at work.” Reflecting on Abai’s values, Dinara says the interview question about his teachings caused her to pause and reconsider her priorities. She now plans to teach her children Abai’s Words of Wisdom. Her grandmother, who completed only three grades of school but quoted Abai as if she carried his book inside her heart, is still her moral anchor. Azhe spent her days cooking, knitting, sewing quraq korpe (Qazaq quilt), reading. She handed down not only skills but a worldview: that knowledge, humility, and purpose are the pillars of a meaningful life. Dinara’s family name, Qutzhol, means “happy and successful path,” while judo translates as “the flexible way.” She believes life gives back according to the values and principles of the one walking its path. Her brand, she says, embodies usefulness, comfort, and beauty. The clothes her team makes are designed to be durable, eco-friendly, practical, and high-quality, helping customers feel confident whether they are attending a ball, running a marathon, or simply wanting to feel equal among others. “Our seamstresses sew love and positive energy into every stitch,” she adds, and she means it.

Looking ahead, Feeling fulfilled in her work, she now dreams of expanding and scaling her business internationally. Dinara dreams of expanding her brand ‘Qypshaq Style’ beyond Qazaqstan. But she says her mission as a social entrepreneur will feel complete only when society fully recognizes the value of every individual. Her guiding principle remains simple: set a goal, move toward it step by step, and treat every obstacle not as a wall, but as a doorway.

When Dinara Naumova’s phone starts ringing in the morning, colleagues in Astana may need a decision from a young deputy of the Mazhilis, or parents from a village rehabilitation center call about children taking first, shaky steps. Between these two worlds runs one promise she made to herself: that no child should feel as unwanted as people once assumed she would be. Dinara was born with cerebral palsy. At three years old her life was reduced to a sentence from doctors: “Nothing good awaits this child – she will just be a large,immobile body without intellect.” Her mother disappeared, her father started another family, and the little girl was left behind. One person refused to accept that verdict. Her grandmother, who after a long struggle became her legal guardian, carried her to hospitals, learned rehabilitation exercises and filled the house with firm rules. “You must have an education. You must have your own income,” she told her. “Whatever your circumstances, you have to be someone.”

The first time that inner confidence broke was at school. Arriving in a wheelchair, Dinara stared at the blackboard and desks, sure she would finally sit among other children. Instead she watched the principal and teachers huddle and conclude: “We’re not ready. What if someone drops her?” She went home and cried. Home schooling, visiting teachers and endless rehabilitation replaced the classroom. With tutors she still finished nine grades, but she did it at the kitchen table rather than among peers. Her grandmother insisted the story would not end there. Dinara chose chemistry and applied to the local college. She walked on new crutches while her grandfather whispered, “Pretend you can walk well, otherwise they won’t accept you.” In the admissions office someone said, “No, we can’t take you.” This time Dinara answered differently: “Let me take the entrance exam. If I fail, that’s one thing. If you refuse me because of my body, that’s another.” She passed with the required score; only after she and her grandmother signed waivers promising not to complain in case of an accident did the college accept her.

Dormitory life was a rough introduction to ordinary youth. She shared a crowded room, cried often and thought of quitting, but stayed and slowly learned to talk, joke and make friends. “I simply didn’t know how to connect with others; I was closed,” she says. It was an early lesson in adaptation: she could not change her diagnosis, but she could decide how to live with it. Back in her village she kept noticing other children with the same diagnosis, lying on sofas or beds, rarely going outside. “Why is no one helping them?” she asked her grandmother. The answer was honest: “We spent our whole life trying to raise and socialise you. Maybe those families don’t have the energy or money we had.” Dinara remembered the years of paperwork and queues her grandmother had endured. “Not everyone can endure that,” she realised. Out of this came the idea that would define her life: a local center where children with disabilities and their parents could receive support free of charge.

At eighteen she began sending grant applications wherever she could, but replies kept saying it was not yet her time. A TV project, “Menin Armanim” – “My Dream” – finally seemed like a breakthrough. She presented her idea, won, and was promised backing from an investor who even came to her village, stood with her in the crumbling House of Culture she hoped to renovate, listened to the estimate and then said: “You don’t need an investor. You need someone to pity you and just hand you the money. But that person won’t be me. If you believe in your project – do it. But without me.” “That broke me,” she says. “Everyone in the village already knew I was creating something. And then suddenly – nothing.” The dream did not disappear. While she studied and worked, “something always pulled me back to the project, like intuition,” she says. Eventually persistence met opportunity. The Foundation of the First President supported her proposal, then she won a grant “Tauelsizdik Urpaktary” to repair rooms, buy equipment and hire a small team and as a finalist of the grant programme was on the meeting with President Kasym-Jomart Tokayev. “That’s how the Center was created – literally bit by bit,” she says. “Now it has been working for three years.” The center earns almost nothing; Dinara keeps it alive from her own salary so that children can come for free. Some of the staff also have disabilities.

Her favourite moments are small ones that outsiders might overlook: a mother calling to say her daughter has started crawling; a boy who once came as a shy teenager returning with a college diploma and his first job. “You watch someone move from needing care to taking his own steps,” she says. “Those moments give me deep inner warmth.” Running the center also changed her from the inside. At first she was tormented by a feeling that nothing she did was enough. Gradually she let go of what she calls her “God complex” – the idea that she had to save everyone. “Even if we can’t help all children, helping some already means a lot. The main thing is to be near.” Balancing the center with parliamentary work and requests for advice leaves little time for rest. “Ninety to ninety-five percent of my time is taken by work,” she says. When exhaustion builds, she spends a couple of quiet days alone or returns to her village. Her grandmother still anchors her with two phrases: “Be glad if you have dirty dishes – it means you have something to eat. Be glad if your phone never stops ringing – it means people need you.” Dinara smiles when she repeats them.

Another part of her journey has been to heal self-worth. She met her biological mother at thirteen, heard her apology and chose not to live in resentment. It took years of inner work to break the thought “I’m worse than everyone,” but now she can say: “Even my story with my parents – that’s not a minus, it’s my plus. I trust God. He knows which path is mine.” That inner reconstruction shapes how she moves through public space.

In parliament, colleagues often tell her, “We never thought of you as a person with a disability.” She answers, “Because I never positioned myself that way. From the start I set the tone: I’m fine. I’m capable. I belong here.” She knows that entrepreneurs with disabilities in Qazaqstan still carry a double load: physical limits and the quiet question, “Are you sure you can handle this?” That is why she argues for a more attentive ecosystem, grants linked to mentorship, realistic guidance, trust in people who know their own bodies and challenges. When young women come to her with big dreams of social business, she listens and then gently grounds them.

Fear is natural, she adds, “the key is to make friends with it.” If she has to name her own compass, she offers three words: faith, structure, consistency. Faith in herself, in her mission and in her team; structure to organise limited energy; consistent action, even when progress is slow. In that weaving of mind, heart and will, the little girl once dismissed as “a large, immobile body without intellect” has become a woman who drafts laws, mentors others and spends her weekends celebrating when a child at her center takes an uncertain first step. Through Dinara, inclusion in Qazaqstan becomes not an abstract policy but a lived practice of standing beside those whom the system once left behind.

Even in moments of bankruptcy, when partners betrayed him and he lost everything, he refused to succumb to the inertia that Abai describes so vividly. “I will prove that I am not the last,” he told himself, drawing on qairat (will) and on the steady encouragement of his wife. He worked again, starting over, building again, teaching others, creating spaces for people with disabilities to develop skills, autonomy, and confidence. His 20+ years of community leadership, advocacy for legislative change, and mentorship of young athletes further reflect Abai’s call to purposeful service rather than empty prestige. Through Duysengali’s story, Abai’s words are not abstract ethics, they become lived experience. The antidote to vice is not punishment; it is meaningful labor infused with dignity. The antidote to aimlessness is contribution. And the antidote to moral decay is the kind of unwavering discipline and service that define Duysengali’s life.

Where Abai warns of those who seek importance through gossip, manipulation, or idleness, Duysengali represents the inverse: a man who earned community respect not by rhetoric but by relentless action; not by begging favors but by creating opportunities for others; not by idle roaming but by purposeful movement. In the Tolyq Adam sense, his life harmonizes aqyl (mind), jurek (heart), and qairat (will) through work that uplifts others.

Duysengali Ospanov was born in a time and place where life demanded more from some than from others, and he understood this early. He grew up in a Qazaq household where responsibility was not an abstract value but an everyday practice. When his parents passed away, the younger siblings remained under his care. Though he had two older brothers, they already had families of their own, and the moral weight of the household eventually settled on his shoulders. “I had to start working early,” he recalls. “I had to raise the younger ones.” What could have been a burden instead became the first clue to the way his mind, heart, and will would shape the rest of his life. He studied to become a mechanic, but higher education remained unfinished. Life needed him sooner than any degree could. He entered the workforce as a Komsomol youth, driven not by dreams of prestige but by necessity. Yet even then, he carried a restless curiosity, an instinct to build, to fix, to create. That instinct would return later in life, strengthened by hardship and refined by purpose.

At twenty-four, everything changed. An accident shattered his spine, leaving him paralyzed and facing a future he had never imagined. “My arms weren’t working for a year and a half,” he says quietly, the memory still sharp. For a long time, the world around him was measured in inches rather than kilometers. A chair instead of movement. Silence instead of the rhythm he once knew. He had never met people with disabilities before — had barely encountered the very concept. Suddenly, he was living inside that reality, trying to understand what remained of himself.

But inside that silence, a fire lit itself. “I thought, no, I should live,” he says. The first victories were small: a twitch in his fingers, a movement in the arm, a moment of laughter after weeks of fear. Eventually, he fought his way back to mobility in a wheelchair. Then came the day he first sat behind the wheel of a car again, hands trembling, yet determined. That taste of freedom, of movement, of possibility, would later define his life’s work. When perestroika arrived in the 1990s, Qazaqstan was a landscape of chaos, opportunity, and survival. He entered business because there was no alternative. “I needed to survive,” he explains. He opened the first kiosk in his region, a small box of food and clothing, modelled after what he had seen in Leningrad. He was living in a village at the time, not in the city, but he recognized opportunity where others saw confusion. From kiosks he moved into construction, creating building blocks with handmade molds. “Several people, a team,” he says. “We made everything ourselves.” Later, he worked in farming, mowing hay, selling meat, and trading grain. For nearly a decade, he lived by the rhythm of the land, another kind of discipline that shaped his endurance.

Yet disability was always there, not as an obstacle, but as a reality he had to navigate in a society that did not yet know how to include him. Qazaqstan had laws, but not mechanisms. Rights, but not implementation. He encountered discrimination openly: banks refusing loans, officials doubting capacity, institutions treating disability as deficit. “Until a disabled person proves they are the same as everyone else, they won’t believe you,” he says. He felt this deeply, not only for himself but for all those he met through his growing involvement in community work. And here, another transformation began. Over time, he realized that his entrepreneurial drive was not only about income, it was about meaning. He founded “Umit” (Hope), a public organization that would become a center of training, adaptation, and empowerment for people with disabilities in the region. For more than twenty years, he and his team have offered courses in computer literacy, business basics, and financial literacy, skills that open doors to independence. “A person today must know everything,” he insists. “You cannot move forward in the market if you are specialized in only one thing.”

He became chairman of the organization “Nadezhda,” president of the Kostanay Regional Parasports Federation, and a key figure in disability advocacy. He traveled across Qazaqstan and Russia, leading motor rallies for five consecutive years to demand restoration of laws allowing for cars with manual controls for drivers with disabilities. These rallies were not symbolic, they were acts of civil activism rooted in courage. “We wanted the authorities to restore our rights,” he says. Sometimes there were fifteen cars, sometimes eighteen, people with disabilities driving across steppes and cities, showing the country what independence looks like. But still, the laws did not change. And so he turned to the solution he could control. He learned to install manual control systems for cars, first through a contract with Czechoslovakia, later with manufacturers in Russia. Qazaqstan had no factory that produced this equipment, no institution willing to take responsibility. He filled that void with his own hands, his own knowledge, his own entrepreneurial spirit. The devices he installs allow paralyzed people, people with limited hand function, and people in wheelchairs to drive independently. “So they can travel to work and school independently,” he repeats. Independence, dignity, and movement: these are the foundations of his work. His dream has always been to open a factory in Qazaqstan. “If we opened one, we could serve all of Central Asia,” he says. But time, resources, and systemic barriers prevented this vision from fully materializing. Still, the dream itself carries purpose. He now hopes to pass that dream to the next generation

His household reflects the same spirit of mutual support. His wife, also a wheelchair user and a law graduate, works alongside him in the public organization. They dance together, wheelchair dances that transcend limitations and celebrate movement in another form. Their marriage of thirty-two years has been shaped by hardship and deep resilience. When he went bankrupt once, losing everything, it was she who told him: “This is just a dark streak. There will be a white one.” Her belief carried him when his own strength faltered. “I wanted to prove to myself that I’m not the last,” he remembers. And he rose again.

His days are full, meetings with city and regional akimats, sports training, community work, installation projects, consultations with districts, helping families obtain equipment or resolve bureaucratic issues. His schedule runs from 7 a.m. to 11 or midnight. “Life is movement,” he says. “I don’t give myself rest.” Sports is a source of joy, he is an International Master of Sports in table tennis and organizes the annual Ospanov Cup, attracting 18-20 athletes from Qazaqstan and Russia. He mentors younger athletes, leads teams to competitions, and delights in their successes. “When my students buy an apartment or start their own work, this gives me strength,” he says. Their achievements become his fuel. He is also a man who finds solace in nature: fishing, traveling to historical sites, visiting ancient settlements like Turkestan and Saraichik. These journeys connect him to ancestral memory, grounding him in something larger than the present moment. Yet he worries deeply about Qazaqstan’s rural areas. “Young people leave,” he says. “Villages are emptying.” He imagines a system where the state gives livestock, land, and equipment to those willing to work honestly, rewarding diligence, holding people accountable, and revitalizing rural economies. His concern for the countryside echoes his broader vision of fairness, dignity, and opportunity, values that run through every part of his life.

When speaking of Abai, he cannot choose a single word. “Every word has deep meaning,” he says. Abai’s timeless moral guidance resonates with him because he has lived through the same questions of character, strength, and community that Abai wrote about. His own life embodies the Tolyq Adam ideal, not through theory, but through action: intellect sharpened by necessity, heart strengthened by service, will shaped by adversity. When asked what advice he would give entrepreneurs with disabilities, he says simply: “Assess your strength correctly and believe in yourself. Be persistent and patient. Study your field from all sides.” Success, to him, is not wealth. “True success is when your work brings spiritual satisfaction. When you can help others.” He looks to the future with clarity. He wants development for his organization, opportunities for young people, and competent entrepreneurs who can represent Qazaqstan internationally. He wants his students, and future generations of people with disabilities, to rise higher than he could. He dreams of teaching business management, passing down his knowledge, but time is scarce, and there are always competitions, trips, responsibilities. Still, he knows that someday he will mentor the next wave of leaders.

And so Duysengali Ospanov moves forward, steadily, persistently, expanding the circle of what is possible for others. His work benefits his family, his community, his region, and the larger idea of inclusion in Qazaqstan. The annual open cup was held in his name. In the harmony of his actions, one can feel the quiet truth of Abai’s teachings: that a full person is one whose aqyl (mind), jurek (heart), and qairat (will) live not only for oneself, but for the betterment of others.

There are people whose lives take shape not through ambition or the pursuit of wealth but through a quiet, persistent calling that refuses to be ignored. For Emin Askerov, that calling began before he even understood it. He grew up listening to his mother’s stories, told late at night after long days working as a district social worker in the early 2000s, when electricity was often cut and salaries went unpaid. She would return home exhausted and tell him about the elderly people she visited, the families she helped, the children whose lives hung on tiny acts of compassion. “My mother shared their pain with me,” he recalls. “I grew up hearing these stories. That’s how it all started.”

These stories planted in him an understanding that service was not a profession; it was a way of being. Years later, when he found himself working in one of the most prestigious institutions in the country, with a good salary, a personal office, a stable routine, he felt none of the satisfaction he imagined success would bring. Instead, he felt something that surprised him: a profound emptiness. “Everything was going so well,” he says, “and that was the problem. There is no middle ground in nature. You either develop or you degrade. I realized I was degrading.” It was in 2014, during this period of internal discomfort, that he first encountered the term “social entrepreneurship.” He remembers the moment vividly. “

The idea electrified him. Suddenly, the quiet calling he had felt since childhood had a name, a form, a possible path. He walked away from stability and stepped into uncertainty. “Ninety-eight percent of the people around me said I was a fool,” he says. “They told me: you won’t survive, they won’t survive, this isn’t realistic.” But he could not imagine trading more of his life for comfort without purpose. “Life is too short to work a job you don’t like,” he says simply. “I decided to take a chance.”

His first attempt was disastrous. He launched a handicraft workshop based on felt weaving, an area he had no expertise in, and within a year, they had lost 5.5 million tenge. “It was a complete failure,” he admits. “I realized I was a bad businessman. I didn’t have the skills. And my team was suffering because of me.” He calls this period “the first crisis,” and he remembers preparing his farewell speech to his staff multiple times while driving to work. Three times he drove with a rehearsed apology on his lips, ready to close down and send everyone home. Three times he could not do it. “It was too painful,” he says. “People were coming not only for money but for the chance to belong. They had been sitting at home for years. They needed this.”

He decided instead to learn. For three months, he attended business trainings, often for free because, as he jokes, “I must have had the look of a loser.” But those three months transformed him. “I understood that business is like a Rubik’s cube,” he says. “If you don’t know the formulas, you will never solve it.” He learned systems, quality control, sales, the logic of clients and markets. “The most important person in any business is the client,” he says. “Without a client, there is no business. And we had been creating what we wanted, not what anyone else needed.” Armed with new knowledge, he closed the failed workshop and reopened as a sewing and production workshop focused on specific, high-demand services. Slowly, success began to take shape. Today, his enterprise, now known widely in Qazaqstan, employs around 45 people across multiple workshops in Astana and Pavlodar, with services ranging from sewing and printing to wooden toy production and corporate gifting. They serve top hotels, government institutions, and schools. “People think I became successful because I was first,” he says. “But no, I was simply the first to speak loudly about it.”

His workshop became known for something more remarkable than its products: its people. Emin hires individuals who are systematically overlooked, people with physical disabilities, intellectual disabilities, hearing impairments, former prisoners, orphans, single mothers, and others who have lived entire lives in the shadows of stereotype and exclusion. “People ask me whether it is difficult to work with them,” he says. “I always say: it is much easier to work with them than with ‘normal’ people. Their motivation is off the charts. If you’ve been sitting at home for 30 years because no one believes in you, not even your parents, then you give everything to prove you are capable.” He selects not by skill, but by spark. “I look for one thing,” he says. “A sparkle in the eyes. If I see that, they can learn anything.” Some of the most powerful stories in his life come from moments when people defied expectations

One of them is the story of Farhat, a young man who had lost 95% of his vision after a weaving accident. When he arrived at the workshop, he asked Emin only for a chance. “He told me, ‘I’ve been sitting at home for five years. No one will hire me,’” Emin recalls. Emin didn’t think Farhat would last even a week. “Weaving requires perfect vision,” he says. “I didn’t want to refuse him, but I also didn’t give him a stipend. I expected he would leave soon.” Instead, Farhat showed up every day, first to arrive, last to leave. For months, he made no progress. Emin prepared, more than once, to gently let him go. But every time he saw Farhat hunched over the weaving frame, hands trembling but determined, something stopped him. And then, after four months, a miracle: Farhat produced his first perfect basket. “When I saw it,” Emin says, pausing, “I could barely hold back tears.”

The muscle memory had taken over; his hands had learned what his eyes could not see. He went on to become a master weaver, teaching others. Eventually he left, not due to failure, but because he discovered a new calling. He founded his own public foundation teaching blind people how to use smartphones and laptops. When Emin later saw him selected among the 50 best social projects in Qazaqstan, he hugged him with pride. “He became my mentor,” Emin says softly. “Whenever I face something difficult, I remember him. If he could do that without sight, then what excuse do the rest of us have?” Another story is about Ibrahim, a young man with intellectual disability whose family asked Emin simply to give him a place to belong. They never imagined their son would earn a salary. Emin decided to make him the “head of cleaning,” a role that required structure, routine, and responsibility. It took six months of daily reminders before one morning Emin walked into the workshop and found Ibrahim cleaning on his own, without being told. Later, they discovered him confidently using an electric sander, mastering skills no one expected him to. Emin filmed him and sent the video to his family. “They thought he was sanding with sandpaper,” he laughs. “They didn’t imagine he could use a machine.” These stories are not exceptions, they are the core of Emin’s world. “People trust us because they see quality,” he says. “I never hide behind the social aspect. We must compete with traditional businesses. We must deliver excellence.”

He has a rigorous selection and training process, and a mentoring system where experienced workers, often from the same social category, train newcomers. “I never blame a newcomer for mistakes,” he says. “I blame the veteran who trained him. And I do it in front of the newcomer. This creates a sense of responsibility, mentorship. It works incredibly well.” He has built an environment where dignity is restored and people find their “spark,” as he calls it. Over the years, his workshop’s employee turnover rate has remained at 1%. “Every businessman dreams of that,” he says. “Once they find belonging, they never want to leave.” Despite numerous offers, including a recent offer for a Deputy Minister position, he refuses to enter government. “I realized that with today’s bureaucracy, I could drown in paperwork,” he says. “I can do far more for the country from the outside.” He believes social entrepreneurs solve problems the state cannot reach quickly enough. “We free the government from many social burdens,” he says. “That is more valuable than any one official.”

He is now working on building a Central Asian network of social entrepreneurs and pushing for policy reforms, digital systems, and clear implementation guidelines for the laws supporting social entrepreneurship. He dreams of a future in which hiring people with disabilities is not charity, but simply a normal, expected business practice. “A modern society must be inclusive,” he says. “Not ‘helping’ them, but living together as equals.” Through all of this, Emin lives Abai’s philosophy without naming it. His intellect is seen in his systems thinking, his business discipline, and the way he studies international models from the UK, US, Norway, and China. His heart is visible in his empathy, his loyalty to his employees, his refusal to give up on people society has thrown away. His will is reflected in his courage to leave comfort, face repeated failure, and persist until the mission became sustainable. Today, when people ask him how he maintains his energy, he answers with a simple truth:

He teaches young people, he advises schoolchildren, he mentors new social entrepreneurs, and he continues to give guest lectures on leadership and motivation. He tells children that success requires a mentor, just as Isaac Newton said he stood “on the shoulders of giants.” He encourages them to create innovative social projects connected to their future professions, not clichés. “Don’t walk dogs or visit orphanages just because everyone does it,” he tells them. “Create something meaningful. Something unique.” He also tells them the rule he lives by: “Nothing is impossible.”

Today, the impact of Emin’s work cannot be measured by the number of products his workshop produces or the number of awards he has received. It is measured instead in the quiet revolutions taking place every day among people once dismissed as incapable: the blind young man who became a master and then a founder; the young man with intellectual disability who mastered machinery and now keeps the workshop spotless; the former prisoners who earn dignified updates to their future; the workers who save for homes, marriages, and independence. It is measured in the transformation of society’s imagination: showing what is possible when one person believes deeply, stubbornly, relentlessly in human potential.

Emin often says that if he could live his life again, he would choose the same path, even with the failures. “Those mistakes were my training,” he says. “Only the person who has made the most mistakes can become an expert.” He speaks often about his mission, but when he summarizes it, it always sounds the same, simple and sincere: “We don’t need to help them. We just need to believe in them.” And in believing, he has built a life that embodies the essence of the Tolyq Adam: a person whose intellect, heart, and will are aligned toward goodness. A life where the soul finds peace in service. A life where rising means lifting others. A life where ordinary people become extraordinary. A life where, truly, nothing is impossible.

Farhat Katrenov was born in Karaganda, but his memories of home are not tied to that city. His story truly begins in Astana, where his parents moved when he was still a baby. This new capital, growing with ambition and concrete dreams, would shape his life in ways no one could foresee. He remembers childhood as ordinary and cheerful, a house full of warmth, laughter, and a future still unwritten. He wore glasses early, but no one ever imagined that eyesight, this most delicate window to the world, would one day slowly fade into darkness. He speaks of his early youth with a smile tinged by the hindsight of loss: “It was gradual… my vision just slowly slipped away.” Around 2003, doctors diagnosed him with a retinal disease. He and his family tried everything, treatments, surgeries in Almaty and abroad. But the slow erosion continued. “Retinal diseases are insidious,” he says quietly, “they destroy vision gradually… sometimes almost completely.”

Losing vision in one’s twenties is a rupture, one day you walk freely, the next the world becomes something that must be deciphered through other people’s voices, the tapping of a cane, the sweep of memory. He was officially classified as having first-degree visual disability. And suddenly, society’s boundaries pressed in, expectations of what he should be capable of shrank overnight, even though his mind, his dreams, his ambitions remained intact. For a few years, life stood still. Days stretched into one another. “You start thinking: what next? Will I even be able to do anything?” The apartment became a kind of quiet prison, not by walls but by doubt. He tried seeking employment, but whenever employers learned about his visual impairment, rejection came instantly: “Nobody wants to hire you, even if you can do basic tasks.” He looked around and saw that for people who lost sight, opportunities were vanishingly few. But something deep inside, the heart that refuses to surrender, the mind that keeps searching, the will that insists on movement, was already stirring.

He discovered his first true tool of independence not in a rehabilitation center, but in technology. “Smartphones,” he says, smiling again. In 2014, he bought a phone with his sister, and inside it he found, almost like a hidden message, accessibility features designed for blind users. He began to experiment: how to navigate, how to send messages, how to explore the internet without sight. It became his refuge, his bridge back to the world. He joined chats with visually impaired friends from Qazaqstan and Russia. They exchanged tips, solved each other’s problems, learned together. “I could register anywhere, communicate, learn new things. It was like discovering the world anew.” Technology gave him not just access, but dignity, a taste of autonomy that had almost slipped from his grasp. That digital path led to something even greater, love. He met his future wife online. What began as shared curiosity and communication grew into a partnership of care, respect, and mutual strength. He likes to call her “my right hand.” She walks beside him with unwavering devotion: guiding him on the street, decoding documents, completing the bureaucracy that stands like a fortress before social initiatives. “In everything, she supports me.” That partnership sparked a new possibility: what if he could do for others what technology did for him?

He began working at the Blind Society (Kirov Organization), teaching others to use smartphones and computers. He saw fear dissolve into joy when someone learned to send a message again or make a phone call without help. He realized that blindness does not erase ability, only access. This understanding ignited a mission. In 2017, he and his wife founded the public association TifloSmart Society for People with Disabilities. The name reflects their core belief: smart technologies for blind users can unlock independence and confidence. “We wanted visually impaired people, upon hearing the name, to immediately understand, this is a place where they can master modern tools.” Through government social contracts in 2018–2019, TifloSmart began training people who had lost vision, teaching them to use smartphones, join video conferences, access social networks, manage their lives again without sighted assistance. Many were afraid to even hold a touchscreen phone; he remembers guiding them finger by finger: “Where to tap, how to swipe.”

He never received formal mentorship, “no one trained me,” he says, but that selftaught journey became the foundation of his teaching. His ability was earned through perseverance. As Abai would say, aqyl (mind) grew through curiosity, qairat (will) through persistence, and jurek (heart) through responsibility to others. He expanded his skills further. He became a certified massage therapist. He is now completing higher education in Physical Culture and Sports, preparing to combine rehabilitation work with social entrepreneurship. At School No. 10 he taught orientation and mobility: “People who lose their sight need to be able to move independently, indoors, outdoors, everywhere… to feel more confident.” His tone when speaking about empowerment is calm but firm: “If doors don’t open, you need to find your own path.” This is not arrogance, it is survival wisdom learned from being underestimated. His organization has continued evolving. Today, TifloSmart supports adults with various disabilities, not only blindness. The goal: create a space where they can receive therapy, find community, regain confidence, and work.

Recently, they were allocated a new office, 80 square meters. But it came as an empty concrete shell. “We had to start everything from scratch,” he says. Renovations became a new kind of endurance test: buying materials, dealing with unreliable workers. “There were moments when I wanted to give up.” But he didn’t. Soon, the center will have a massage room, activity areas, and, importantly, a psychologist’s office. “People come not only for therapy, but to talk. To feel they are understood.” He dreams of creating additional workplaces for people with disabilities, spaces where their skills are valued and their dignity preserved. He remembers a past enterprise where visually impaired workers made baskets by hand: “It suits blind people, they need labor rehabilitation and social interaction.” Work is not only income, but healing.

And yet, the world outside those walls remains uneven. Accessibility is still selective, inconsistent. One example frustrates him deeply: although their new office has an interior ramp, the building itself does not, “People in wheelchairs can’t even reach the entrance.” Their letters to authorities receive polite redirections, but no action. Snow is left uncleared for weeks unless someone complains. “Sometimes things are forgotten,” he says simply. He never dramatizes, but reality speaks for itself. The support ecosystem for entrepreneurs with disabilities, he says, exists “in name.” Programs and grants are there, but often poorly explained. “People don’t understand where to apply, how it works.” He shares his knowledge so others don’t remain lost in confusion, but wishes that society would meet citizens with disabilities halfway, with information that is clear, accessible, human.

He does not claim to have faced discrimination. “It’s not bad will, just lack of awareness.” A gentle, generous interpretation. Yet his observations reveal the deeper truth: “People are still afraid to hire people with disabilities.” Qazaqstan is improving, yes, but slowly. “Abroad, workplaces are created specifically for them. Here, very few exist.” What he loves most in his work is connection: when an older person comes with confusion and leaves with hope. “It gives a special sense of fulfillment to be useful.” What exhausts him is the emotional load of constant requests: “Even at eight or nine in the evening, people call. And you are human too, you want to rest.” Still, he responds, because he knows the feeling of being alone in the dark.

Nature restores him. In summer, he and his family escape the city: “Traffic, routine… sometimes it becomes too much. You go somewhere quiet, and you can breathe again.” He has many friends, across Qazaqstan, people he met after he lost his sight. They share not just experiences but resilience. Friendship is another form of mobility; connection makes distances feel shorter. His advice to others is simple and strong: “Don’t give up. Take everything into your own hands. The main thing is to start, even small.” This belief is his compass. “Not everything will succeed immediately,” he says with a half-smile. “But if there is a goal and desire to move forward, everything will definitely work out.” When asked what he would change in his past, he pauses thoughtfully: “I think I would go the same way. I am not the type to just sit at home.” Adversity did not choose him to break him, but to reveal what he could build.

What is success? “It’s when you are needed. When your work benefits others.” With quiet pride, he adds: “I have a family, a daughter, a wife. I have a beloved job. In my own world, I am truly successful.” His motto: “If it doesn’t work out … you still have to keep trying until it does.” Not inspiration, instruction. Not just for him, but for everyone who believes disability ends possibility. Sometimes he wonders if losing sight had a purpose: “Maybe it was necessary, to show others that not all is lost. Disability is not the end of life. It doesn’t mean you’re not needed.” He dreams of expanding TifloSmart, more offices, more workplaces, more impact. But he doesn’t rush, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” For now, he focuses on building community, one person at a time.

Farhat’s story is one of reclaiming agency, taking life into your own hands even when society tries to place it out of reach. His journey reflects Abai’s moral triad: aqyl (mind) in his continuous learning and innovation, jurek (heart) in his compassion and service, and qairat (will) in his refusal to surrender to despair. He embodies resilience not as loud heroism, but as quiet persistence: the courage to keep moving, step by careful step, toward a future he cannot see with his eyes, but perceives clearly with his heart. His life reminds us that blindness is not the absence of vision. Sometimes, it is the beginning of seeing differently, more deeply, more humanly. Through his work, Farhat ensures that others who find themselves in darkness discover the tools, the support, and the belief to rise again. And as he said, success is being needed, and in Qazaqstan today, his presence, his guidance, his unwavering optimism are needed more than he realizes.

In her relationship with others, she also lives Abai’s moral demand. She never shames those who depend on her; she shoulders difficulties without bitterness; she blushes not for herself but for systems that neglect people like her son. The pain she feels when she watches him suffer, unable to help, reflects the empathy Abai describes, the capacity to feel ashamed for the failures of society, for the ways others fall short of dignity, for the suffering of those who deserve better. Her life is a quiet rebuke to the “shamelessness” Abai condemns, the attitude of those who say, “Yes, I have behaved badly, but so have others,” or “If they can do it, why can’t I?” Galina never thinks like this. Her moral compass faces inward. When she speaks of difficulty, she responds with patience. When she speaks of success, she responds with humility. When she speaks of dreams, she prays that they align with what is right.

Galina Kudinova has lived many lifetimes within one. When she introduces herself, she does it with a modest smile, as if recounting an ordinary life: a woman from Shymkent, a mother of four, an entrepreneur, a second-group disabled person, and a caregiver to her adult son with cerebral palsy. Yet each piece of that introduction carries a story of loss, faith, unbroken resolve, and an ethic of care that has shaped her into a woman whose quiet persistence has built not just a business but a community.

Born and raised in Russia, Irkutsk region, Kak-Uchei village, she married young and worked at a tire factory through her youth. Those were stable years, predictable shifts, steady income, a structured life that seemed to promise more of the same. She and her husband built a household through hard, honest work raising animals, tending to land, feeding a growing family. Their life was modest, but it was theirs, and it held a rhythm familiar to post-Soviet families trying to rebuild after the turbulence of the 1990s But in 2000, everything collapsed at once. Her daughter died at sixteen, an unbearable loss no mother should ever have to endure. On the same day, her husband broke his leg, immobilizing the family’s only reliable provider. And just two months earlier, their youngest son, Vlad, had been born with cerebral palsy. In a single season, Galina found herself holding her entire household upright while her own heart was breaking, her husband unable to work, her baby needing constant care, and her remaining children looking to her for stability

She remembers having no money even for bread. She collected bottles to buy food. She prayed and fasted until she weighed only 42 kilograms, begging the Almighty for a way to keep the children alive. “People say difficulties are punishment,” she reflects. “But really, they are love. They make a person stronger.”

One dawn, she awoke from a dream that would change everything: “Make kvass.” She felt goosebumps. She had never imagined herself making kvass; she had no recipe, no training, just desperation and something like a whisper of guidance. She went to an elderly neighbor to ask how kvass was made. The woman told her:

water, yeast, bread. That was all. Galina began boiling and experimenting at night while the children slept. Some batches were sour, some made people laugh because they were slightly intoxicating, but she kept refining the recipe day after day. Within a month, she produced something she could sell. With a baby in one arm and bottles in a stroller, she carried kvass to small cafeterias and market stalls. She worked through the night, pouring and capping bottles by hand, then delivering them at dawn before her husband’s shift started. “When you do something with love,” she says, “the difficulties don’t feel heavy.” It was not kvass alone she was producing, it was survival.

She earned three thousand rubles in a single day once. She remembers the wonder of going to the market and buying meat and cookies for the children. That feeling of feeding her family with her own labor, clean, honest, and immediate, became her first taste of entrepreneurial dignity. Her husband initially doubted the idea. “Kvass? Everyone sells kvass in barrels,” he told her. But she insisted: “They can sell theirs. We will make ours.” That stubborn certainty, that fusion of will and instinct, carried her through those early years. As her business grew, she reinvested every tenge into improving production. She first hired a girl to help, then another. She organized delivery points. She built a workshop with a loan and repaid it in a year. She still remembers the satisfaction of expanding to a one-ton capacity. Every achievement was won with sweat, prayer, and the unbending resolve to keep going because she had no other choice. Vlad needed treatment, expensive treatment. Armenian doctors, courses costing a thousand dollars, herbs and injections, travel and rehabilitation. She and her husband withdrew their pension savings, begged sponsors, and received unexpected help from a Baptist church in America. They believed every promise that he might walk, even when those promises proved false. “We tried everything,” she says. “He is still with full intellect, he understands everything, he wants to work.”

Through all this, she never paused to take care of herself. Her own disability came later, in 2014, when she fell down a high staircase at home and broke her thoracic spine. She spent almost a year bedridden. Her husband and sons cared for her, lifting her, feeding her, helping her move. With rods in her back, she eventually learned to walk again. She cannot lift heavy things now, but she refuses to see herself as limited. “My disability does not affect me,” she insists. She did not tell anyone for years, she felt it was unnecessary information, something that might make people see her differently. She returned to work, managing the production process, overseeing quality, ensuring every bottle met her standards. Her eldest son, watching her strain, convinced her to automate the production line. With his help, she worked with suppliers from China to install machinery. Today, her kvass workshop runs with a small team, a semi-automated line, and twenty-one years of accumulated expertise. She speaks of it with pride, not as a businesswoman boasting, but as a mother who built something that has kept her family alive.

Her identity as a caregiver intertwines with her identity as an entrepreneur. Vlad, now thirty, with sharp intellect but a body that refuses to obey him, is her constant companion. She moves him from bed to wheelchair and back, cleans him, feeds him, sits him at the table with small online tasks while she works. On days when he has severe neurological episodes, she wants to cry from helplessness. Yet she still dreams for him: independence, work, dignity. He now has mentors, small assignments, and a first taste of entrepreneurship. “He does it with desire,” she says. “He wants to be independent.”

Her husband, aging and unwell, can no longer play the role he once did. “If you go, how will I manage here?” he asks. So she limits her travel, though she longs sometimes to rest. She cannot remember her last vacation. Even at the dacha, she is caring, organizing, ensuring everyone around her is fed and comfortable. “I’ve forgotten what rest is,” she admits gently. Yet her heart remains open. She sponsors celebrations for children with disabilities, coordinates volunteers, and runs a club called “World Without Borders,” where over forty people with disabilities gather for community and joy. Two couples have already met and married through the club. She organizes New Year events, finds sponsors, and brings joy to adults who “behave like children” but whose happiness lights up a room. These acts of giving sustain her. “When there is no communication, there is no life,” she says The community fills her with strength.

Her views on Qazaqstan’s disability policies are sharp and formed by lived pain. “There is almost no free medicine,” she says. “Doctors don’t visit. Ramps are made so poorly that a healthy person can barely climb them.” She remembers carrying her grown son to the polyclinic herself. She wants society to see, not abstractly but concretely, how invisible people with disabilities can become in health systems, social services, and urban design. “More attention,” she repeats. “We need more attention.” Through all this, she continues expanding her business. Demand grows every year. Clients recognize her kvass as natural, clean, and good for health. She will never compromise her recipe, never add chemicals, never chase profit at the expense of quality. “I don’t want to praise myself,” she says. “Let people praise the kvass themselves.” She refuses shortcuts. She refuses easy profit. Her work is an expression of conscience, of Abai’s insistence that a full human being must unite reason, heart, and will. She lives this truth not through grand speeches but through quiet, consistent deeds.

Her dreams remain large. She wants to expand her workshop and reach the global market. She wants her workspace close to her home so she can care for Vlad. She wants to scale, grow, improve, innovate. And she wants to teach young people, not in formal mentorship programs, but in the same organic way she does everything: by opening her doors, sharing her experience, and encouraging them to dream boldly.

When asked whether she considers herself successful, she hesitates only for a moment, then answers: “Yes, of course.” Not because she measures her life by money or status, but because she has held her family together through tragedies that would shatter most people. Because she built a business from nothing. Because she raised children while caring for a son with disabilities. Because she supports a community, nurtures others, and refuses to let hardship harden her spirit. Because she built her life around love, for her children, her work, her neighbors, her employees, and even strangers who taste her kvass on a hot Shymkent afternoon.

She ends her interview the way she runs her life, without drama, without selfcongratulation, simply and sincerely. “I love my family. I love my work. I love all of them.” And in that simple statement lives the essence of Abai’s complete person: a harmony of intellect, compassion, and will forged through suffering, sustained by faith, and carried forward by love. Galina’s life may seem ordinary to her, but to those who listen, it reveals the extraordinary strength of a woman who rebuilt her world with her own hands, and who continues, every day, to create spaces of dignity, inclusion, and hope in Qazaqstan.

Before the accident, Gulmira Batpakulova was a young woman who moved through the world freely. Her life looked ordinary from the outside, school, friends, dreams, but she carried within her a quiet determination to make something meaningful of her future. Then, in 1993, everything changed. A traumatic injury fractured the cervical and thoracic vertebrae in her spine. A new identity, person with disability, entered her life overnight. In 1998, she was officially assigned to the first disability group. A wheelchair became her companion, a symbol of loss at first, before it evolved into something entirely different: a platform, a movement, a road forward.

It was not an easy transformation. When speaking about the early years, she doesn’t dwell on grief, but it is felt lingering in the pauses between her words. The world around her changed as much as her body did. The Qazaqstan of the 1990s was not a place prepared for disability inclusion. Adapted infrastructure, equal access, public understanding, these concepts barely existed. But Gulmira refused to shrink into the margins where society often pushes people after injury. She found strength in community. She found purpose in helping others survive what she had survived. “We were involved in public activities,” she says, remembering the beginnings of her calling. Together with others newly disabled and long disabled, she began advocating, first for herself, then for everyone like her. They went office to office, meeting to meeting, explaining, insisting: people with disabilities deserve education, jobs, dignity, and independence. It was exhausting work, but necessary.

In 2006, this activism crystallized into something permanent: a collective built on solidarity. They registered the “Arba” public association in 2009, Arba, meaning “wheelchair,” but also evoking movement, the ability to transport weight, to continue traveling even across difficult landscapes. A wheelchair was not simply a device, it was freedom when the ground itself is uneven. The association works with all categories and groups of disability, embracing the full spectrum of human need. Its purpose is deeply human: “As soon as someone becomes disabled,” she explains, “we support them until their full inclusion into an active societal life.” The newly disabled often experience the darkest isolation, physical, emotional, economic. Gulmira and her team refuse to let them fall into that void alone.

But advocacy alone is not enough. In Qazaqstan, NGOs struggle with sustainability. Projects come and go with funding cycles. To truly support people, to give them a place to work, to learn, to heal, she needed something stable. A livelihood. A business. And so Gulmira took a bold turn toward social entrepreneurship. Her business began with sewing, repairing clothes, designing lingerie, crafting bed linens, and later, creating beautiful bridal and souvenir items. What began as a small operation grew into the primary income-generating activity of the association. “Yes, we have a team,” she says with pride. A team that includes people who once thought they had nothing left to contribute

“Employment for people with disability,” she says firmly, “is our main goal.” For that goal, she refuses to compromise on expectations. Her team produces quality, or they don’t release the product. “Society doubts,” she admits, “that people with disabilities can produce high-quality products and be competitive.” She has lived inside that prejudice for decades. But she has also outgrown it. In the last five years, this doubt has shifted. “We built our image,” she says. “We have proven ourselves.” Customers return, because quality dismantles stereotypes faster than words. Sewing expanded into baking, pies and pastries made by hands that were once dismissed. Then into IT technologies, managing Instagram pages, blogging, content creation. “We have started working in other areas,” she says, almost shyly, though the scale of what they are accomplishing is anything but small. They are learning constantly, adapting relentlessly, reinventing themselves as opportunities shift.

But challenges remain. Some are subtle, whispered doubts, lingering stigma, while others are physical and unavoidable. To buy raw materials, they must navigate narrow doors, steps without ramps, warehouses inaccessible by wheelchair. “Physical barriers,” she sighs. “So many.” If independence means managing production from start to finish, then independence requires access, and the city often refuses it. So Gulmira does what she has always done: she builds community. Volunteers, families, social work students, young people hungry for purpose, help carry what her team physically cannot. Through collaboration with universities, she helps train future professionals not only academically, but emotionally, to understand disability as humanity, not difference. Stress, however, is a silent tax she pays daily. “Not very positively for my health,” she admits. Leadership demands decisions, advocacy demands conflict, entrepreneurship demands risk. “Constant stress and consequences.” Her smile tightens here, some costs cannot be seen, but they accumulate over time. She once found peace sitting beside a lake, holding a fishing rod next to her husband. “Even without catching anything,” she says, “it was energizing.” Her husband has since passed away. Fishing trips are memories now, soft, painful, and sacred. Books have become her escape. Pages are a kind of freedom, places where movement is limitless

“Mentorship,” she stresses. “It is rare. But greatly needed.”

Training programs teach theory. Markets demand survival. Without continuous guidance, many entrepreneurs with disabilities fail before they bloom. Entrepreneurship has changed her internally. “More financial independence,” she notes. That means more control, more agency, more dignity. She has learned to manage a team of fourteen people, fourteen people who depend on her leadership, but also who strengthen her capacity to dream. Yet, she remains humbly self-aware: “I still feel there’s a knowledge gap hindering growth. Something is still missing.” This humility is not insecurity, it is her engine. She wants stability, a constant stream of income that safeguards the future of her association and the families it supports. She wants to recruit and train new team members so she can be more mobile, not because she wants to step back, but because leadership grows by empowering others to rise. “If each team member had more knowledge, I’d be more mobile,” she explains. Independence multiplies when shared.

Her advice to aspiring entrepreneurs with disabilities is wise: “Engage initially in public activities,” she says. See the world. Understand people. Learn where your voice and skills align with real needs. Then choose your path. When entrepreneurship rises from purpose rather than panic, success takes root. Gulmira’s story is not about overcoming disability, it is about redesigning society so disability does not need to be overcome. It is about transforming exclusion into economic contribution, transforming pity into partnership, transforming weakness into collective strength. Her work answers a call deeper than profit, a call rooted in the Qazaq spirit of interdependence, in the dignity of eńbek (labor), in the belief that every person has something precious to give. And recently she gave birth to her daughter. Though she may sit in a wheelchair, she is not sitting still. She leads. She creates. She builds bridges, both literal and symbolic, where walls once stood. She supports those who have newly fallen into darkness, and she walks with them until they find their way back into light, into community, into the beating heart of society.

When we talk about progress, policy, or inclusion, we often forget that true transformation begins with individuals who refuse to accept limitations imposed upon them. Gulmira does not carry slogans, she carries responsibility. She does not fight for special treatment, she fights for equity. Her wheelchair does not hold her back; it carries her exactly where she intends to go. Her journey embodies the harmony of aqyl (mind), jurek (heart), and qairat (will), the essence of Abai’s Tolyq Adam. People like Gulmira do not wait for a better Qazaqstan. They build it. Hand by hand. Stitch by stitch. Life by transformed life. And through her, others learn to see that disability does not define human worth, contribution does

Another element of Word Thirty Seven that resonates with her life is Abai’s observation that the world holds many illusions, flattery, false friendship, empty praise, and that a person must learn to distinguish between sincerity and show. Gulmiram’s narrative includes quiet awareness of this: people doubted her, discouraged her from studying, judged her pregnancy, or looked at her disability with pity or condescension. Yet she neither internalized nor retaliated against these reactions. She simply continued growing, learning, and building her life. By refusing to live in the shadow of others’ perceptions, she embodied the self-possession and steady moral compass that Abai urges his readers to cultivate.

Her relationship with difficulty also aligns with Abai’s teaching that misfortune is not permanent and that only the weak give up hope. She has faced pain, loss, stigma, and the daily physical challenges of disability, yet sees her life through a lens of gratitude. Her daughter gives her joy; sports give her strength; work gives her meaning; and every day brings her opportunities to be useful and kind. This refusal to surrender to bitterness, her ability to welcome small joys even after deep hardship, reflects Abai’s belief that spring always follows winter.

Gulmiram Srazhova’s life unfolds in the western city of Aktobe, where the wind moves across the steppe with the same persistence that has carried her through every turn of fate. Today she is an athlete, a coach, a public activist, a small business owner, and a single mother. To meet her is to feel an unexpected brightness, a refusal to let life harden her spirit. But the roots of this brightness lie deep in a period of darkness that redefined everything she thought she knew about herself and the world. Her disability was not something she was born with. It came abruptly at fifteen, through a railway accident that took both her lower limbs and her left forearm. She remembers that time not only through the lens of physical loss but through the shock of an identity suddenly broken apart. Before the accident she was a medical college student, running freely, dreaming freely. Afterward, she faced an entirely new landscape,one where even walking, studying, and being seen required immense courage. At that age, the world feels large and one’s own fragility feels unbearable; yet she learned to stand psychologically long before she learned to stand physically. She says little about those early emotions now, but the quiet firmness in her voice suggests a reservoir of resilience that has become the foundation of her adult life.

In the years after the accident, she made a decision that would become characteristic of her: not to be defeated by circumstance, but to meet it with — aqyl (mind), jurek (heart), and qairat (will) — an inner balance that Abai would call the essence of the Tolyq Adam. She completed her recovery, and when it became clear that the medical college was no longer an option, she carved a new path. She enrolled at Zhubanov University and earned a degree in elementary education with honors. Later she entered the NGO world, working in a public association for people with musculoskeletal impairments. Eventually she would complete a second higher degree in law, and later a master’s degree in physical education and sport, following each new field as necessity and curiosity required. “A person should never say they have reached everything,” she says. “There are no boundaries to selfdevelopment.” Over the years she found herself drawn more deeply into sports, eventually becoming both an athlete and a trainer in track and field for people with disabilities. Shot put, javelin, discus, the disciplines that demand force, precision, and willpower seemed to resonate with her inner strength. Training in the open stadium under the sun became her refuge. “For a quarter of a century I’ve been on that track,” she says. “Those hours bring me the most joy.” But becoming an athlete did not solve the practical challenges of life. When she became a mother at forty-seven, her sense of responsibility shifted sharply. Her daughter was only four months old when she began wondering how she would secure a stable future for the two of them. She had spent years in public work, writing reports, attending meetings, and found herself worn out. Her income was modest, and social assistance for people with disabilities was limited. She needed a new source of stability, one that allowed her to build a future rather than simply endure the present.

This was the beginning of her entrepreneurial path. Her first step into business was far from grand. She began studying targeted advertising through Kaspi and YouTube videos, learning late at night while her infant daughter slept. “Once I decide, I make the decision quickly, and correctly,” she says, with the calm confidence of someone who has learned to trust her own judgment. She opened an online shop and registered her sole proprietorship. At first nothing happened; the shop sat unchanged for months. But the turning point came when her niece, an enthusiastic home baker, suggested they try developing the confectionery direction together. With modest means, they began selling cakes and chocolate-dipped strawberries, simple offerings, but crafted with care. Her niece handled the baking, while Gulmiram managed Instagram, orders, and customer interaction. “I didn’t have much skill in confectionery,” she admits. “But I believed in my family and learned along the way.” The e-wallet filled slowly, small amounts, but steady. And more importantly, the work felt light, something she enjoyed instead of endured. She saw how business could be done “with love,” and not with the Sovietera mentality that every loaf of bread must come from toil and suffering. Here, joy was allowed. Creativity was allowed. And the customers responded. As she speaks about her business, the concept of responsibility surfaces repeatedly, not only responsibility to her daughter, but responsibility to clients and to the Almighty. “When you sell food, you must be 100% sure it won’t harm anyone,” she says. “It is a very big responsibility.” She dreams of expanding, of opening a real workshop that meets all sanitary standards. She watches competitions and grant announcements from banks and companies like Coca-Cola, quietly hoping for a chance to scale.

Motherhood is the core of her entrepreneurial motivation. “A mother must be a guarantor that her child will live in sufficiency and safety,” she says. The business is a means to give her daughter a dignified life, education, experiences, a home. Through a “50/50” bank program, she has even bought an apartment, carrying the loan with a pragmatic acceptance: “This is life,” she says. “We must live here and now, be happy now. If the mother is happy, the child is happy.” Her daily routine is structured around this philosophy of presence and balance. Each morning she wakes with her daughter, takes her to kindergarten, and then devotes the day to training, public work, network marketing, or handling confectionery orders. She plans her schedule carefully so that by the time she retrieves her daughter in the evening, she can be fully, lovingly present. Their evenings are filled with drawing, storytelling, learning languages, and simple joy. “She has taught me to enjoy life,” Gulmiram says. “She delights in small things, and I delight with her.”

But motherhood also brought physical challenges. During pregnancy she could no longer use her prosthetics, and after giving birth she developed complications in her knee joint. She switched to a wheelchair, which created new obstacles and physical discomfort. “My lower back hurts; I can’t sit for long,” she says. “I post content even lying down sometimes.” Yet she refuses to surrender to limitations. Her goal is to return to prosthetics, despite the physical pain. “Prosthetics give more freedom and independence,” she says. She wants that freedom back, not only for herself, but so she can bring her daughter everywhere, unburdened. Despite her strength, she has known the sting of prejudice. People stare, sometimes with pity, sometimes with confusion. “Society doesn’t know how to see people with disabilities,” she admits. But she meets these gazes with forgiveness

Women play an enormous role in her life, her eighty-year-old mother, whom she calls her “spiritual teacher,” and the leader of her public association, a woman whose selflessness inspires her deeply. She sees every woman, even those struggling, as carrying something worthy inside. “God forgives even the fallen,” she says softly. “I try to learn from everyone.” Her own resilience developed partly because she often faced doubt from family and society. When she wanted to study at the university, her relatives questioned how she would get there, there were no ramps, transport was difficult, taxis were too expensive. She simply found a way, sometimes hitchhiking to reach classes. “In life, whenever you set out to do something, people try to dissuade you,” she says. “But the main brake is your own mind.” Her most private battle was the decision to become a mother through IVF at fortyfive. She hid the pregnancy for months, fearing judgment, fearing her own vulnerability. “Until the baby moved inside me, I didn’t believe it was real,” she says. When her mother found out, she was speechless for half an hour. Society whispered; some assumed she had adopted. She ignored it all. Becoming a mother restored her sense of wholeness. It also gave her a new inner vitality.

Her business values reflect her worldview: bringing joy, respect, patience, and love into people’s homes. “A cake is a symbol of friendship, respect, and love,” she says. Success for her is not glamor, but contentment. Money is simply a tool to secure life, health, and stability. For women with disabilities seeking to enter business, she offers direct advice: decide for yourself. “You can consult your mother, brother, husband, but the final decision is yours,” she insists. “You must understand your own resources and capabilities.” To help others, she believes Qazaqstan needs more micro-loans and grants specifically for people with disabilities, enabling them to try, fail, and grow.

She dreams now of living to see her daughter grow into her own person, of building larger projects, and of developing her athletes into champions. She laughs as she describes her aspirations, to speak beautifully, to live a vivid life, to continue inspiring others. And many already come to her for advice, encouragement, or simply comfort, women, friends, strangers, young athletes. “When someone succeeds,” she says, “it brings me satisfaction.” There is a quiet heroism in the way she moves through life, without bitterness, without self-pity, grounded in the harmony of mind, heart, and will that Abai believed forms the foundation of a full human being. Through loss, reinvention, motherhood, and entrepreneurship, Gulmiram Srazhova has shaped a life marked not by what she lacks, but by the abundance she creates around her. And in every cake she bakes, every athlete she trains, and every moment she shares with her daughter, she continues to choose life, love, and dignity, a testament to the strength of the human spirit.

They were born together, two brothers entering the world in Pavlodar on a day that would define the rest of their lives more painfully than anyone expected. The delivery was catastrophic. Their mother was told that survival itself was uncertain. Later, she would repeat to journalists that mistakes and negligence during the birth had left both boys with cerebral palsy, a condition that would shape every movement, every step, and every rhythm of their lives. But long before the twins could form memories, their mother made the first defining decision: she would raise them not as “invalids,” not as shadows of other children, but as sons with a full place in the world. It was her voice, her will, and her fierce tenderness that built the foundation on which their entire journey stands.

Their earliest memories are not of words but of textures, cold rails under the arm, the sound of other children running ahead, the feeling of waiting to be dressed and carried outside. It was a quiet grief that children don’t know how to name: the grief of “not catching up” to childhood. Later, Ilnar would describe it simply:

That was perhaps their first awareness that they were “different,” though never “less.” Their mother made sure of that. She told them, again and again,

Both brothers remember the looks— the pitying, the frightened, the mocking. In adolescence, those looks cut deeper than any physical pain. Yet their mother taught them an ethic of strength without bitterness. She never promised them a special path. She warned them gently: “No one owes you anything. If someone gives extra — good. If not, you must know how to live on your own.” Her honesty could be severe, but it made them immune to selfpity long before adulthood arrived.

Their father left early, unable to bear the weight of three children, two of whom would require constant work. The twins have long made peace with this. “Everyone has a choice,” Ildar says simply. “He made his. Our choice is to honor our mother and live our lives without resentment.” Their sister became the quiet frontline, driving them, standing by them, offering the small daily acts of loyalty that form the unseen architecture of many lives. Their education was home-based, but never easy, never diluted. Teachers rotated through their house—math, language, history—expecting them to keep up with the same curriculum as other students. The home became their classroom, playground, gym, and community center. After lessons, they read endlessly, played, helped around the house, listened to songs, and joined family gatherings filled with dombyra music. It was an atmosphere that made life feel whole, not lacking, only different in arrangement.

There were moments of rage too. Rage at their bodies that refused to obey. Rage at stairs without ramps, at curbs too high for wheels, at bathrooms impossible to enter. Rage at teenagers who sneered or pointed. Rage at a world built for others. “In youth you explode because your hormones, ambitions, and reality do not match,” Ildar admits. But they learned a crucial survival lesson early: “If you stay in that anger, it will devour you.” Their mother showed them how to turn anger into energy, for work, study, and growth. They absorbed that lesson so fully that it would later become their entrepreneurial backbone. They did receive therapy, massages, occasional treatment. But the real rehabilitation was daily life itself. “No center can give as many exercises as one ordinary day,” Ilnar says. Dressing, transferring from bed to wheelchair, descending stairs, getting into a car, every ordinary movement was a training sequence they repeated their entire lives. Gradually, the body they once saw as an enemy became a partner with limitations but also gifts: strong hands, sharp minds, patient endurance, deep sensitivity. “Now I treat my body as a partner,” Ilnar explains.

Their path to entrepreneurship began with a sacrifice — one that only a mother like theirs could make. In the early 2000s, she bought them their first computer in parts, with enormous difficulty. To the brothers, it felt like someone had opened a window into a wider universe. Ilnar spent hours dismantling, exploring, understanding. The day a friend asked him to clean a computer and reinstall a system, and then paid for it, something clicked. “I realized the thing I do out of interest can be work,” he recalls. That moment reshaped their future.

There were failures, moments when they misdiagnosed a problem or installed a faulty part. But what hurt most was when people blamed mistakes on their disability, not on the complexity of the job. So they developed a principle: always correct mistakes at their own expense, always explain, always treat reputation as more precious than income. The turning point came when strangers began calling, people they had never met, who came because others recommended them. It felt like a quiet certification, earned not through formal documents but through trust. Their day now begins not with coffee but with negotiation, with the body itself. “Even getting up is a project,” they say. Their condition is exactly as they describe it: for Ilnar, the right hand works, the left is damaged from birth; he moves by leaning on the right arm, pulling his body forward, his legs not supporting weight. By evening, the body burns with exhaustion. Mornings begin with courage. After preparing children for kindergarten and navigating the city’s unfriendly infrastructure, they descend steep steps into a tiny basement workshop without a ramp. They built everything themselves. It is immaculate: cables coiled, screwdrivers lined with musical precision, motherboards arranged like manuscripts. Cleanliness is not decoration, it is respect, for work and for people.

Their income comes from repairing and maintaining computers and laptops — cleaning, diagnostics, replacing parts, installing programs. They also repair TVs, monitors, and small electronics. For families with very low income or for children with disabilities, they quietly assemble computers from leftover parts, often for free or for symbolic payment. They never present this as charity. It is, for them, simply the right thing to do. They have encountered every form of disrespect. Healthy clients bargaining aggressively over tiny sums, insisting on discounts they never give others. People assuming incompetence because of a wheelchair. “It is hurtful not because of the money, but because of disrespect,” Ildar says. Yet they remain gentle and direct, never turning to bitterness. Their prices are just below average, enough to be accessible but never exploitative. They prefer satisfied clients over maximum profit. Their social media presence transformed their business. When videos and articles about them began circulating, people saw not “two guys with cerebral palsy” but professionals. Clients multiplied, messages from across Qazaqstan arrived, and strangers wrote heartfelt words. It gave the brothers a rare sense of being seen as whole humans.

One pivotal gift changed everything: a deputy donated an apartment after a media story. For the first time, the brothers had stability, a home they could not be evicted from. “But it did not come ‘just like that,’” they emphasize. It followed years of work, visibility, and the goodwill they had generated. The pandemic tested them. Orders dropped sharply, money shrank, the future felt uncertain. But technology breaks even in a crisis. They tightened costs, worked harder themselves, and endured. In that quiet time, Ildar returned to the dombyra, reminding himself that art and discipline are intertwined. “If you learn something truly, you never forget,” he says. Their inner lives are intimate and vulnerable. Ilnar worries constantly about his daughters’ future, fearing that society will judge them through the lens of their father’s disability. He works every day to ensure they never carry that stigma. His wife Zhanar lives with visual impairment. Their home is a dance of mutual support, imperfect but rooted in deep understanding. Ildar, meanwhile, walks his own path, still waiting for the person with whom he could “walk hand in hand through life.”

They have moments of wanting to quit, on days when pain is sharp, clients are few, bureaucrats send them in circles, or strangers online write cruelty. But then a client says, “Without you I couldn’t manage,” or their mother calls, or their nieces laugh, and the world becomes bearable again. Abai’s teachings run through their lives like an underground river. When Ilnar read Abai’s words on the unity of mind, will, and heart, he suddenly recognized their little workshop: mind in diagnostics and learning, will in conquering stairs and pain daily, heart in their attitude toward people and in assembling computers for those who cannot afford them. Without naming it, the brothers live the Tolyq Adam ideal. Their dreams for the future are modest and vast at once: a normal, accessible location; a small team including other people with disabilities who deserve dignified work; and a legacy their children and nieces can be proud of. They imagine a workplace where entering in a wheelchair is not an act of courage, but simply a doorway. If they could speak to their 15-year-old selves, they would say:

Their lives are a testimony not of triumph over disability, but of something deeper, two brothers who learned to transform difficulty into dignity, anger into determination, and pain into purpose. In their cramped basement workshop, where every movement is planned and every tool has its place, they have built more than a business. They have built a way of being: steady, honest, compassionate, and whole. They are entrepreneurs with disabilities, yes, but more than that, they are craftsmen of resilience, caretakers of each other, sons of an extraordinary mother, and quiet exemplars of the Tolyq Adam path.

In the bustling city of Almaty, shaped by a complex post-Soviet legacy where disability often carries deep societal stigma, Kira Shulgina’s narrative emerges as an inspiring embodiment of resilience, creativity, and self-realization. Born and raised in this culturally vibrant yet challenging environment, Kira’s life immediate opposition from the stark prognosis of her ophthalmologists: “They told me I’d inevitably go blind and questioned how I could possibly pursue medicine.” Yielding to family pressure, Kira shifted her academic path, first studying law, but soon finding the profession incompatible with her deteriorating vision. Struggling with document-intensive tasks, Kira courageously explored new directions. “I wanted to be a psychologist after medicine, but my uncle said psychology wasn’t a real profession,” she recalls, marking yet another pivotal moment in her quest for fulfillment.

Driven by her inner will and resilience, she turned to fitness and yoga, roles that nurtured her heart and physical strength. Ultimately, her enduring dream to heal found its manifestation in massage therapy. “I worked at a state polyclinic near my home,” she shares, “but after nine exhausting years, particularly after COVID, the atmosphere became unbearable. My department head wouldn’t even greet me,” a profound disrespect that served as her tipping point.

Her courageous leap into entrepreneurship was fraught with fears and insecurities reflective of Qazaqstan’s broader socio-economic uncertainties. Kira confesses candidly: “I was terrified I’d starve without my stable salary of 110,000 tenge.” Nevertheless, her resolve, fueled and entrepreneurial journey deeply reflect Abai’s philosophy of Tolyq Adam, harmoniously integrating mind, heart and will towards holistic human flourishing. From childhood, Kira harbored dreams of becoming a doctor, driven by a heartfelt passion to heal. Yet her aspirations faced by dignity and self-respect, propelled her forward, transforming a small rented room into her own therapeutic sanctuary for children. Though profoundly fulfilling, entrepreneurial life brought distinct challenges tied directly to her visual impairment. “My insecurity stems from my difficulty maintaining eye contact. Clients often misunderstand, thinking I’m speaking to someone else,” she explains. Yet, Kira’s persistent will, complemented by her compassionate jurek (heart), has transformed these vulnerabilities into unique strengths. Her narrative exemplifies Abai’s holistic vision, as her entrepreneurial journey has become a profound personal transformation

The everyday systemic barriers Kira faces in Qazaqstan’s urban landscape further illustrate her resilience. “Every day outside is stressful. Sidewalks, curbs, steps — nothing here accommodates my needs,” she notes poignantly. The absence of empathetic assistance from strangers further accentuates these hardships. “People just observe without offering help. It hurts deeply,” Kira reflects, highlighting societal barriers more challenging than physical ones. Balancing entrepreneurship with family life proved another formidable challenge, profoundly shaping her emotional wellbeing. Her son’s honest reflection was a heart-rending awakening: “Mom, you weren’t around when I was little.” These words deeply impacted Kira, prompting her profound internal shift from obligation to genuine desire. “I replaced ‘I need to’ with ‘I want to,’” she explains, a transformative insight gained through personal development courses, marking a new chapter of self-care and internal harmony.

Despite infrastructural and social challenges, Qazaqstan’s supportive entrepreneurial policies have significantly aided Kira’s business. “In Qazaqstan, we have excellent entrepreneurial support for people with disabilities. Reduced taxes and prioritized tenders,” she proudly shares, yet she emphasizes the need for greater clarity and accessibility in available resources

Looking to the future, Kira dreams pragmatically yet ambitiously: “I have clear financial goals — to build a strong team and expand services.” However, her immediate focus remains on nurturing her practice’s intimate and inclusive atmosphere, where families feel comfortable and cared for. Kira’s definition of success transcends financial prosperity, deeply aligning with the values of respect, recognition, and personal fulfillment. “Success for me means being respected and valued. It’s essential for my self-realization,” she firmly states, proudly celebrating her identity as a recognized specialist in pediatric massage. Reflecting on her journey, Kira’s advice to other entrepreneurs with disabilities resonates profoundly: “Open your business today, don’t wait. Don’t let fear hold you back.” Through resilience, compassion, and continuous self-growth, Kira Shulgina stands not merely as a successful entrepreneur but as an inspiring testament to human potential and dignity, overcoming adversity and redefining disability through holistic self-realization. Kira’s narrative illustrates the profound power inherent in harmonizing one’s aqyl (mind), jurek (heart) and qairat (will), as advocated by Abai. Her journey is a compelling testament to the resilience needed to transform perceived deficits into profound strengths, highlighting a holistic approach as essential for personal and entrepreneurial success.

Even when she breathed through a ventilator, unsure she would survive, she did not surrender compassion. She noticed who stayed. She forgave what failed. She chose life because others chose her. Abai ends his Book of Words by saying that humans differ only in how deeply they comprehend what the Most High has created. By this measure, Kulanda stands among the wise. She has seen the fragility of the body, the limits of institutions, and the unpredictability of opportunity, yet she continues to act with dignity. Her justice is responsibility — teaching when she cannot sit, guiding when she cannot walk, dreaming when she has every reason to stop. Her love is stubborn, active, sustaining. Through her story, Word Forty-Five becomes visible. Completeness is not bodily perfection but maturity of spirit. Abai calls us to love and justice; Kulanda answers with her life, showing that even when the body fails, the human being can still rise — not by force, but by love.

In her, Abai’s final Word finds its echo: “that what makes a human complete is not strength or mobility, but the ability to meet suffering with compassion, to meet injustice with dignity, and to keep creating meaning in a world that often overlooks those who cannot stand"

Kulanda is a former teacher and language educator from Kazakhstan whose journey into entrepreneurship began after a life-altering spinal injury left her paralyzed. Drawing on decades of experience in education and multilingual communication, she transformed personal adversity into a source of purpose, founding an inclusive, home-based online teaching practice that reached students across the country. Before her disability, she had worked both in academic settings—including Narkhoz—and in school environments, experiences that deepened her understanding of how language, access, and opportunity shape young people’s futures. Despite systemic neglect and multiple rejections from support institutions, including Atameken and UNICEF, she remained committed to education as a tool for empowerment. Her innovative adaptations, teaching from bed, using digital tools, and building cross-border networks, reflect her deep resilience and vision. Inspired by her late aunt, writer Aziza Nurmakhanova, Kulanda’s dreams center on inclusive education, teacher training in sign language, and equitable access for children with disabilities. Her story is one of dignity, perseverance, and healing, grounded in Abai’s ideal of the Tolyk Adam, a complete human being guided by mind, heart, and will. Before paralysis shaped her life, purpose did.

Her journey began when she was still a university student, driven by the simple wish to help her parents during financially difficult years. It was the tense era of 1986, the time of Zheltoksan. Because she spoke Kazakh, Russian, and English, a construction administration department hired her — a rare appointment for a young Kazakh woman at the time. “Maybe they hired me because I was smart,” she says with a smile, “or maybe because I had long hair.” Whatever the reason, she became the first Kazakh girl the department had ever hired, while other Kazakhs worked only as manual laborers. Her role placed her at the center of large, technically complex projects. She coordinated foreign specialists, including Japanese seismologists who were working on major seismic and construction initiatives in Almaty. As she recalls, “I was receiving the seismologist engineers from Japan and handling the organizational work.” Through this work, she witnessed nearly every major construction project in the city between 1982 and 1994. Kazakh workers would brighten when they saw her, asking whether she spoke Kazakh, finding pride and encouragement simply in her presence — a young Kazakh woman representing them in a space where they were rarely seen.

Kazakh workers looked at her with pride. “They would ask if I spoke Kazakh. I think I gave them hope just by being there.” After completing her degree, she returned to her profession — teaching English. She helped open the Kazakhlanguage branch of School №145, collecting parents’ signatures with the akimat and ensuring her own son could study there. She began teaching English in that very school. This was where her path toward entrepreneurship began — quietly, organically, through the shortcomings she witnessed inside the classroom. She realized that although English textbooks were pedagogically useful, they were filled with Russian names, Russian cities, Russian contexts. Kazakh children were learning English through the lens of another country’s reality.

When a British delegation arrived with modern sets of Student’s Books and Workbooks, she saw immediately what Kazakh children were missing. She asked to use these books. The methodologist refused. She argued.

She persisted. She carried four boxes of those textbooks to Astana and submitted a request directly to the leadership. By spring, she received permission to use them as supplementary materials. She translated English names into Kazakh ones, added Kazakh folktales, adapted the content, and helped bring a new kind of English-language learning to Kazakhspeaking students. Her involvement with books grew naturally from there. Therefore, by 2002, she was responsible for organizing materials and later received an offer to help distribute the books and prepare versions for neighboring countries. She took part in tenders, won them, and worked steadily — not as the owner of a publishing company but as a teacher and organizer who knew how to create access where none existed.

She traveled to Aksai to teach English to workers. Italian managers had arrived to lead oil company projects, and Kazakh workers needed English urgently. She promised she could teach them to speak in one month — and kept her word. She trained around three hundred workers. She also worked with African students studying in Kazakhstan. They played football, and she helped organize activities for them, combining sports with English lessons. She and her colleagues wanted Kazakh children to play alongside them, to build teams where language and sport created unity. Then life shifted. One day, descending a staircase in slippery shoes, she fell. Her spine hit the edge of a step. At the hospital, her arms and legs still moved. After the surgery, they did not. Paralysis became permanent. Everything changed at once. The woman who coordinated foreign engineers and trained hundreds of workers now lay staring at the ceiling day and night. She cried silently so her son and siblings would not see. Her family sold their home to cover medical costs. She wrote to clinics in Turkey and India. India agreed to help — then the pandemic began, and the borders closed.

She felt everything she had built slipping away. “All my experience, all my knowledge, it felt wasted,” she says. But life did not abandon her. Her former students did not abandon her. Messages began arriving from the very cities she once traveled to: Atyrau, Aktau, Aksai, Balqash. Parents asked her to teach their children online. She could not sit. She could not hold books. But she said yes. “When I taught, I forgot I was sick,” she says. She used a digital scanner and gave students the physical books. They learned. They passed exams. Many entered NIS and Turkish lyceums. Some later called her from abroad to thank her. Teaching — even from her bed — became her lifeline. As her health slowly improved, she began to dream again. She designed an inclusive online school for children with disabilities—an institution that would reach learners typically excluded by geography or mobility. She wrote a detailed business plan and submitted it to Atameken for consideration. She envisioned naming the school after her aunt, Professor Aziza Nurmakhanova, a respected academic and author of Shygys Shynary, the well-known book about the war hero Äliya Moldagulova. Beyond her academic work, Aziza was someone who consistently took care of vulnerable groups, especially children and women who had nowhere else to turn. Honoring her through the school felt natural: two women from one family, “two daughters of two brothers,” connected by a shared understanding of what it meant to support those the world often overlooked. In her aunt’s honour, she wanted to build a learning space where access would be unconditional.

She reached out internationally: a Parkinson’s institute in the United States agreed to provide materials. They informed her that earlier training materials were kept at Abai University, but although she contacted them, she received neither books nor electronic copies. Still, she kept searching. Teachers from India and Pakistan—biology instructors, crafts specialists, language trainers—stood ready to work remotely with Kazakh children. All of the structure was forming. She assembled curricula, coordinated video-links, prepared textbooks, and drafted outreach strategies. And then came the rejection: Atameken dismissed the application without explanation. The emotional shock broke her body again. She could not breathe. She was put on a ventilator for four months. In the silence of the ICU, she wrestled with despair. “I was lying in the hospital thinking, maybe it’s better to leave this life. But then I turned my head and saw my brother and aunt lying beside me on the floor. They hadn’t left. They were just sleeping there quietly. And I thought, how can I leave them? They love me.” She started applying for jobs. She experienced bureaucratic absurdities and rejection after rejection. She applied to one program for people with disabilities, only to be told she could work as a hairdresser— despite her paralysis. She submitted documents to UNICEF—no response. She sought a subsidy—denied. She watched as jobs for people with disabilities were quietly cut during downsizing. “Systems talk about helping,” she says. “But they don’t.”

At last she found something. A remote position through an e-government portal: she supported blind users to navigate online services. She worked six to seven months full of hope; then she was asked to come to the office. The commute was impossible. She left. Then she gained a new contract: coordinating student admissions for a university in Moscow and sending applicants abroad. She is now in contact with universities in France and Turkey as well. Today her dream is simpler and yet more profound: she wants Kazakh schools to adopt sign language. “Even for children without hearing impairments, gestures help understanding,” she says. She wants inclusive teaching—not narrowly for disabled children, but for every learner. She imagines children of all abilities sitting in the same classroom, using varying modes of communication, supported by teachers trained in empathy and creativity. Her daily life remains difficult. She dresses wounds, manages chronic pain, and lives on a disability pension of 95,000 tenge (~180 USD) a month. One 100-metre roll of medical gauze lasts barely a month. Subsidies are elusive; job offers are rare. Yet she persists.

What keeps her alive is simple: her son.

She remembers the hospital moment when she considered leaving. She recalls the sight of her brother and aunt sleeping by her bedside. Because of them, because of that love, she stayed. Because of them, she still teaches. Because of them, she still dreams. Because of them, she still hopes.

Lyudmila’s narrative unfolds as one of quiet endurance and moral strength, an everyday act of rebuilding life after loss. In 2018, as she stood on the threshold of a promotion and the expansion of her family business, her world suddenly collapsed. A retinal detachment stole nearly all her sight, one eye gone completely, the other left with barely twenty percent of its function. “After the surgery,” she remembered, “my world collapsed.” What followed was not only physical blindness but an inner darkness that took time to lift. She packed away her dresses, gave away her cosmetics, and wept. “I had put a cross on myself,” she said. “I thought I was finished.”

Yet sorrow, for Lyudmila, became a teacher rather than a grave. Supported by her husband, her children, and her mother-in-law, she began to learn again, how to see differently, how to work differently, how to live with purpose despite limitations. She discovered that after two hours at the computer her eyes would fail her, that she could no longer lift small children, that jobs requiring screens or physical labor were no longer possible. So she made a choice that became her turning point: “I had to adapt and find a way to work for myself.” Starting small, she began to buy and resell household products, while her husband handled deliveries, “without delivery, people wouldn’t buy anything,” she explained. Her knack for negotiation and sales soon revived the confidence she had once buried. From a small shop, she grew to a larger one, adding delivery and expanding her network of loyal customers. Her apartment rentals became another income stream, which she managed with sharp intuition and steady professionalism. “I liked negotiating, working with clients, making deals,” she said. “Over time, it became a system.”

But while the business restored her financial independence, it was volunteerism that healed her heart. “I somehow immersed myself in everything at once,” she said. What began as occasional help turned into a full-fledged calling. Within three years, she became head of a volunteer organization, coordinating over thirty-five members and even launching a youth branch with forty children. Service, for her, was a form of gratitude, a way of turning hardship into empathy. “Whenever I hit a low point,” she said, “life throws something new at me, something that pushes me forward.” That forward motion, however, was not without betrayal. “The second blow came when I was about to shut down my volunteer work,” she recalled. A new volunteer she had trusted began sowing division within the team, collecting internal documents and rallying others against her. “It was heartbreaking,” she said softly. “These were people I had worked with for years.” The conflict, born of ego and ambition, nearly destroyed her organization. But when she considered quitting, new volunteers — young, idealistic, sincere — arrived as if to remind her that good still answers good. “After that,” she said, “I no longer fear people like that. They keep coming back, but I’ve learned to handle them.”

Her resilience took on a philosophical edge. She began studying numerology, not as superstition but as a tool for discernment. “I calculate a person’s numbers and instantly know what to expect,” she said with a wry smile. It was her way of reclaiming control in a world that had once taken it from her. Life, she discovered, has patterns, and so do people. She now meets manipulation with insight, not anger. “We don’t give such people access to important information anymore,” she said. “We learned.” And yet, beneath all this toughness, Lyudmila remains deeply human. “Sometimes I want to step away,” she confessed. “I think, why do I keep running after something? Why can’t I just stay home, cook, and take care of the kids?” For a brief moment, she tried to live that life of stillness. “But I lasted only two weeks,” she laughed. “I started getting bored. I realized this isn’t for me.” Her vitality, her refusal to give in to numbness, is perhaps her greatest strength. Even exhaustion becomes renewal when a new project calls. “I always tell myself I’ll just help from the sidelines,” she said, “and yet somehow I end up in the center again.”

This restless leadership, unchosen yet inevitable, defines her spirit. “I never wanted to be a leader,” she said. “But life keeps throwing me into situations where I have to take charge.” She carries responsibility naturally, not out of ambition but necessity. It is her way of keeping her soul alive and her mind clear, exactly what Abai described as the essence of a meaningful life.

Society, however, has not yet caught up with her quiet dignity. “People don’t see vision loss as a real disability,” she explained. “If you’re not in a wheelchair, they think you’re fine.” When she seeks state support, she is often told she doesn’t qualify. “They say, ‘You’re not completely blind,’ as if that means my life isn’t affected.” Even strangers who see her dressed well assume she faces no struggle.

In time, Lyudmila stopped explaining herself. “I used to try proving my struggles,” she said, “but now I don’t waste energy. I just focus on what I can do.” This quiet acceptance is not resignation but moral discipline, the kind of clarity Abai called for when he said that true life keeps the soul awake and the mind alive. Her ventures in real estate, volunteer leadership, and retail may seem unrelated, but together they weave a portrait of moral renewal through labor and service. She does not live for wealth or status; she works to stay alive in the truest sense, to remain useful, clear-minded, and connected to others. “I love being active,” she said. “I love having purpose.” And yet she never feels finished. “There’s always more to build, more to change. That’s just how I am.” When asked what she would tell her younger self, Lyudmila paused before answering:

“Don’t waste time waiting. Just go for it.” It is advice forged not from impatience but from the understanding that life’s only tragedy is passivity, that to live merely in body, without will or conscience, is not to live at all. Her narrative is one of restoration: of sight lost but insight gained, of sorrow turned to compassion, of fatigue transformed into movement. In her, Abai’s moral teaching finds living form, proof that when mind, heart, and will act together, even darkness can become a source of light.

Maulen Akhmetov’s story does not begin with a diagnosis or a personal tragedy. It begins with a simple and persistent tug inside him, a desire to build something meaningful, something that lasted longer than a single charity event or a weekend of volunteering. He had grown up watching how easily good intentions dissolved once the moment passed. What he longed for was a way to help that did not disappear at sunset, a structure that healed quietly and steadily, like the slow work of sunlight on winter ice. By the time he was a university student, this internal compass had already pointed him toward volunteering projects. He spent time in special education classrooms during his exchange year in the United States, encountering for the first time the beauty and fragility of lives that required a different kind of attention. Later, in Almaty, he discovered a small association running a café that employed people with developmental disabilities. He went there first as a volunteer. Then he watched. Then he asked questions. Then, slowly, something took root: It is possible to build a place where inclusion is not charity, but structure, not occasional, but daily.

When he returned to Qazaqstan, he did not yet imagine running his own social enterprise. But purpose has a way of gathering around those who take small steps. By 2016, supported by research emerging from the World Bank and the OECD about mental health as “the most neglected development priority,” he began sketching an idea: a café where adults with mental, developmental, or learning disabilities could work, earn stable income, experience community, and step into adult life with dignity. He wanted it to function not as a symbolic gesture, but as the final step of rehabilitation, a bridge between psychiatric wards or childhood centers and the wider world. He named it simply, a social café. Today it is known as Künde, with one location in Astana and another three in Almaty. Künde literally means: “every day,” “daily,” “with constancy,” “habitually,” “as a daily rhythm.” It carries a sense of steadiness, continuity, everyday life, and the small routines that build a human being. In Qazaq culture, it also has an emotional nuance of: something that becomes part of one’s daily existence, not extraordinary, but natural; a daily practice that shapes character; and the ordinary acts through which community is built. For a social café that employs people with developmental or psychiatric disabilities, Künde is a beautiful, philosophical choice.

But in the beginning, Künde was just an idea, a rented space, and a sense of responsibility he could not quite explain. Opening a social enterprise sounds noble from the outside. But like much of Maulen’s journey, it was born as much from internal struggle as from external compassion. For years he had wrestled with depressive episodes, abrupt seasons where his mind slowed, energy drained, and work felt impossible. In a conventional job, with fixed hours and unyielding expectations, he would have been fired. “Entrepreneurship gave me freedom to survive myself,” he says quietly. It is one of those truths he drops into the conversation without ornament, the way someone mentions weather. It is this inner landscape, the valleys of depression, the fog of ADHD, the long work of therapy, that shaped the kind of employer he became. He understood instability not as weakness, but as reality. And so he built a workplace where instability was not punished. In Künde, if an employee with schizophrenia experiences seasonal decline in spring or autumn, the schedule shifts. If someone needs two weeks off, they keep their salary. If someone struggles with anxiety, the café psychologist steps in. Staff receive life-skills training: reading, numbers, English, how to wash dishes at home, how to set a table, how to help one’s mother. Each of these acts is small, almost invisible, yet together they create something extraordinary: a life of one’s own.

Maulen never imagined he would employ more than twenty-two people with disabilities across both cities, nor that he would witness two marriages, a divorce, and even a healthy child born to a couple where one parent lives with cerebral palsy and the other carries a lifelong diagnosis of mental retardation. He laughs softly when he speaks about it, not out of mockery, but out of awe at the ordinariness of it all. “They go to movies, to theatres,” he says. “They live normal lives.” Normal is a powerful word in a society still learning how to treat difference. Qazaqstan’s Soviet legacy has taught generations to hide what is “not presentable.” Adults with developmental disabilities were long expected to remain invisible, tucked away in psychiatric institutions, or at home, or behind the walls of silence. Childhood centers exist; adulthood, however, is a disappearing bridge. “Once a child grows up,” he explains, “there is nothing.” Künde Café was created precisely to fill that void. For many of their employees, it is the first place where they are not “patients,” “children,” or “invalids,” but coworkers. People with expectations, schedules, uniforms, salaries, and pride.

And for their mothers, mostly single mothers, the change is seismic. With their adult children earning income and gaining independence, these women can go back to work, complete documents, or simply breathe. “We break the poverty cycle,” Maulen says. “That’s a big impact of the project.” There is no pride in his voice, only observation, as if stating the mechanics of light.

Running a social enterprise is not romantic. It is precarious. Everything affects income: egg prices, rent increases, oil shocks, tax changes. While his peers enjoy the stability of corporate salaries, he lives inside volatility. “Every month is different,” he admits, “and no one tells you what to do.” Harder still were the betrayals. One business partner stole the money he had raised just before opening the first café. Another fell into paranoia, stopped working, siphoned funds, and later died in a tragic car accident, after which her mother sued the company. A third partner turned out to be stealing as well. These are the human blows that nearly dismantle a person’s spirit. “I thought people would never steal from a project like this,” he reflects. “But people have their own families. Their own survival.”

He learned, painfully and slowly, to trust with vigilance, to lead with boundaries, and to work with a calm realism that Abai would recognize as the wisdom that sees the world without illusions. Yet even after all of this, he stayed. When asked why, his answer is simple: “A good review from a customer. A happy employee. A sense that something is working.” For some, fulfillment is dramatic. For him, it is quiet. A typical day for Maulen does not resemble the productivity myths of modern entrepreneurship. He exercises daily, a discipline that keeps his mind from slipping into long shadows. He swims competitively. He journals. He sees his therapist. He talks to mentors, some of them older entrepreneurs who share advice with generosity. These routines form a rhythm that supports his emotional equilibrium, his journey toward what Abai calls the integration of heart, mind, and will.

He carries no illusions about worklife balance. He has friends, sports, and evenings, but no wife or children yet. There is acceptance in his voice, not regret, as if he is still learning who he is becoming. “I’ve never worked in corporate,” he says. “Entrepreneurship is all I know. It gives me purpose. I don’t know who I would be without it.” This is not the self-glorifying language of a founder. It is the confession of someone who knows that surviving one’s inner world is already a kind of work. His employees’ well-being is folded into the structure of the café. A psychologist works regularly with them. Daily meetings allow tensions, gossip, misunderstandings, hurt feelings, to be addressed gently. Parents give each other advice: how to obtain subsidies, navigate government programs, or secure state-provided apartments. Eight employees now live in stable housing because of coordinated efforts at Künde.

In Almaty, one of the café is experimenting with a new model: partnering with existing cafés who want to adopt Künde’s methodology. They pay a small royalty, receive training, and hire people with Down syndrome or other developmental disabilities. It is social franchising not as expansion, but as ecosystem-building. Maulen’s dream is not to own dozens of cafés. It is to create a model others can copy, in Qazaqstan, and beyond. “I want something that spreads,” he says. “Something sustainable.” When asked what systemic changes Qazaqstan needs, he speaks less about government grants and more about legal reform, specifically, the restrictive status that denies adults with mental disabilities the right to sign their own documents. This guardianship system, he explains, protects parents but immobilizes individuals. “It takes away legal adulthood,” he says. His café is one of the few places where adults are treated as adults.

Cultural change is slower. “Our culture stigmatizes and hides [disability],” he states plainly. “We have a long way to go.” But he also sees progress, in younger generations, in families who refuse shame, in cafés where employees with disabilities serve customers who smile back. Not all reactions are positive. Some customers avoid the café. Others mutter prejudices. He ignores them gently. “We just try to give good service,” he says. “That’s the only answer.” Success, for him, is not a feeling. It is stability. The ability to support a future family. To sustain the project. To avoid burning out. “Financial stability is important,” he admits. “If you don’t have it, everything else ends.” Yet he also speaks of another success: the balance between giving everything and losing oneself. “If you are healthy,” he says, “that is also success.” He is asked what advice he would give to people with disabilities who want to become entrepreneurs. He hesitates. Something in him resists giving simplistic encouragement. Life is more fragile than slogans. “If you have a family that can support you, then yes, try,” he says carefully. “But without support… it’s difficult.”

The honesty is not discouragement; it is responsibility. Looking back, he would change one thing: choosing business partners more carefully. “I was naïve,” he admits. “I assumed that people would protect a project like ours.” His voice trails, half-tender, half-tired. This is perhaps the deepest lesson he carries: good intentions are not protection, and kindness alone cannot hold up a business. And yet, despite everything, he remains an optimist.

In this balance, between hope and pragmatism, between dreaming and accounting, between compassion and caution, lies the essence of the Tolyq Adam: the unity of mind, heart and will. Maulen does not quote Abai. He lives him. He builds a place where people once hidden can pour coffee, clean tables, laugh with coworkers, fall in love, get married, get divorced, have children, buy apartments, and swim slowly, bravely, across the vast waters between isolation and belonging. A place where humanity breathes freely, and where work becomes a form of healing. A place where no one is hidden. A place where everyone belongs.

When Abai asks whether a quarrelsome, envious person can truly be called human, Mensulu’s life offers the answer. She does not chase status or dwell on unfairness, even when denied grants. She continues with her own labor, her own qairat (will), and a steadiness shaped by hardship met with dignity. Her quiet resilience shows what it means to be a worthy guest: to pass through the world without harming others and to leave behind a trace of beauty.

Her journey becomes a living interpretation of Word Thirty Four. She reminds us that our time is borrowed, our bodies temporary, and our true legacy the sincerity and tenderness we offer others. In moving from shame to self-acceptance and from insecurity to purpose, she reveals that being a guest is not insignificance — it is an invitation to live gently, with humility and compassion, knowing we all share the same fragile road.

Mensulu Satzhan was born into a world that had already decided what she would not be able to do. From the first moment, her body told a different story: she entered life without her right arm, and for years nobody knew she had only one kidney as well. Her parents, loving but protective, learned to navigate the silences of doctors and the loudness of society. In Aktobe, where she grew up, children stared, adults whispered, and strangers tugged at their own children’s hands, telling them not to play with her. “I used to wear long sleeves even in summer,” she remembers. “I wanted to hide the arm that wouldn’t grow.” At school she had no friends at first. She walked the hallways of fifth grade feeling like an outsider in her own childhood, her body a constant reminder of difference. Her parents told her to study well, and she clung to those words as if they were a rope thrown across a shrinking world. Slowly, her brilliance drew people in. She became a straight-A student, the one classmates sought for help, the one teachers praised. She missed Altyn belgi by a single math point, but she graduated with a red diploma37, her academic excellence a shield she built with her own aqyl when society tried to reduce her worth.

At seventeen, searching for work and repeatedly rejected, she entered a women’s association that opened her eyes to something she had never seen before: people like her not hiding, but leading. “Some had no arm, some no leg, but they were beautiful and working,” she recalls. “I wanted to be like them.” She became an assistant, helping run events for children with disabilities, learning from women who refused to collapse under the weight of society’s expectations. It was the first glimpse of a world in which her body did not need to be apologized for. She chose philology because literature had always been her companion. She loved poetry, reciting it alone on walks, recording videos of herself speaking lines that captured feelings she had no other language for. At the university she excelled again, graduating with honors and taking up a teaching position in a Russianlanguage school, where she taught Qazaq language and literature. Teaching children felt natural; she believed for a long time that it was the only thing she could ever do.

Marriage brought warmth but also revelations, an ultrasound after the wedding revealed she had been born with only one kidney. Doctors warned her against pregnancy. “They advised abortion,” she says quietly. “They were worried because of the one kidney and the one arm.” But she wanted her baby, and her OB/GYN assured her that the kidney was functioning well. She carried the pregnancy bravely, only to face an emergency C-section at 36 weeks.

Breastfeeding with one arm was agonizing. “I’d never faced problems like that,” she recalls. Crying spells flooded into nights; the fatigue of stitches, sleeplessness, and the weight of a newborn she longed to care for herself pushed her into postpartum depression. She questioned her very right to motherhood. “I blamed myself. Why did I give birth if I can’t take care of her?” The arguments with her husband were small, irrational, but heavy with shame and exhaustion. Her spirit dimmed until her husband handed her something unexpected: a certificate for a makeup course. At first, she couldn’t imagine it. “How could I do makeup on people … with one arm?” Lashes terrified her; brows came out uneven. But the salon owner, Malika Rakhimova, sent her a single message that changed everything: “If you have the will, you can find a way.” That line planted itself in her chest like a seed of qaýrat (will). On the first day, she was scared; on the second, her curiosity began to outweigh the fear. By the end of the week-long training, something in her had awakened, a feeling she had forgotten since her poetry days: inspiration.

Her daughter was just three months old when she began. Money was tight. She bought her first basic makeup kit for 35,000 tenge through Kaspi paying in installments. Blush, a pencil, a small eyeshadow palette, that was her beginning. She worked through house calls, carrying everything herself. Some clients hesitated when she arrived. “When a makeup artist with one arm shows up, people automatically feel fear, distrust,” she says. She would smile, explain calmly that she had been doing everything this way for twenty-five years. Slowly, people relaxed. Little by little, she was building not just a client base, but a bridge of trust between her life and theirs.

Her parents disapproved when she resigned from teaching right after maternity leave. “Where will you go? Who will come to you?” they asked. She doubted too, but something inside her had shifted. Postpartum depression had pushed her to a breaking point, and makeup became her way back to life. Every time a client looked in the mirror and straightened their shoulders, she felt her own strength return. “Their self-esteem rose,” she says. “And I realized I could do something for people.” Motherhood complicated everything but clarified her purpose. Her children became her motivation, the center around which her schedule rotated. She worked on weekends, spent weekdays with them, and learned to balance exhaustion with tender moments, cooking together, talking, watching their small joys unfold. “Success for a mother is healthy children,” she says. “And for an entrepreneur, it’s being able to thank yourself for bringing your ideas to life.” Her second pregnancy slowed her physically; her legs swelled, and she was told to rest. A friend suggested teaching makeup. So she began in her bedroom, lights taped to furniture, students sitting on the couch, her body heavy with pregnancy but her mind alive. She charged 5,000 tenge at first. Word spread. After giving birth, she rented a chair again, then moved clients to her home, and finally gathered enough experience and courage to open her first studio.

There were setbacks, renovation costs, staff salaries, rising prices for consumables, clients who wanted low prices but high professionalism. Yet she kept moving forward. “My children are my motivation,” she says. “Looking at them, I know what I’m striving for.” Eventually she opened her second studio, adding manicures, lashes, and other services. Growth slowed because the children are still small, but her vision remains wide: study cosmetology, maybe expand into other countries, build something for her children to inherit. Society still throws its glances. She remembers being pointed at on the street, even as a child, and those memories have not faded. But she has changed. “Over the last year and a half, I consciously accepted myself,” she says. She now writes on her Instagram bio: “One-armed makeup artist in Aktobe.” Writing those words publicly was liberation. “Clients know where they’re going,” she says. “And it makes me feel lighter.” She carries within her a quiet strength, the kind that forms not in the absence of hardship, but through it. When women come to her shaking with insecurity, she steadies them through jurek (heart). She teaches them makeup, but more than that, she teaches them to stand in their lives without apologizing. One student, trembling on the first day, now works in Astana with her own clients. “She changed completely,” Mensulu says, glowing with pride.

Her business rests on values of quality and trust. Her life rests on simple practices, movement, home-cooked food, rest when needed, gratitude to God. Government grants never came through; she applied twice and was rejected. But she has learned to rely on herself, her faith, and her craft. When she visits people with disabilities, sometimes climbing stairwells to bring beauty to those who cannot reach her, she understands the full circle of her journey. She was once the child whom adults didn’t let their children play with. Now she is the woman other young girls look at and whisper, “I want to be like her.” She is the one showing them that mind, heart and will are not theories, they are choices made daily in the small acts of work, courage, and care

Her mission, she says, is simple: “To inspire people and bring them joy.” It is the mission of someone who grew up searching for acceptance and decided, instead, to build a world where others might find it more easily. Through her makeup brush, her teaching, her laughter with clients, and the soft wisdom she passes to her children, she embodies more than a profession. She embodies a way of being, a quieter form of the Tolyq Adam, built not through perfection but through perseverance, tenderness, and the will to keep expanding her own life beyond what the world once believed it could be. Mensulu walks through her days with the knowledge that she began with less, but grew into more, not in spite of her body, but through it, because of it. In her story, beauty is not a product; it is a practice. And through that practice, she is reshaping what inclusion means in Qazaqstan, one face, one student, one quiet act of courage at a time.

Meruyert Abylkassymova’s story begins in a small home filled with fabric scraps and the quiet imagination of a young girl. She would take socks from drawers, not to wear, but to transform. The elastic band became a doll’s skirt, a cut piece of cloth became a dress. She didn’t yet know the word “entrepreneur,” but she already understood creation. “I think, wow, I was so creative even back then,” she says with wonder, as if discovering that childhood Meruyert left behind breadcrumbs guiding her future. She grew up, studied economics, and became a teacher. Later she worked in a bank, then in a sewing factory, a place that awakened in her something deeper than employment. She fell in love with embroidery, not just sewing, but the art that gives fabric a soul. Still, life led her into different jobs, and she often felt suffocated in hierarchical workplaces. “I admired the director, he was an entrepreneur, but dealing with the middle managers felt impossible,” she admits. “I realized I wasn’t meant for a corporate job.”

After fifteen years of marriage and three children, Meruyert expected life to feel grounded. Instead, a storm came. Following the birth of her youngest daughter, her body turned against her. The pain arrived suddenly, swelling in her fingers, stiffness in her joints, exhaustion so deep she could barely move. Doctors diagnosed her with rheumatoid arthritis, a chronic condition tied to stress, trauma, and suppressed emotions. A few months later, another blow: an 8-centimeter tumor on her liver. She recalls that time quietly, the fear woven into daily tasks, the confusion of a strong woman suddenly unable to run, lift, or sew without pain. “I used to run marathons,” she whispers, and that whisper holds all the grief of lost power. There were days she needed to call a taxi just to step outside her own home. Her children were still small. Her husband did not yet understand what she carried. Then, in the midst of that darkness, the pandemic arrived.

For many, those years meant isolation and uncertainty. For Meruyert, they became the beginning of a rebirth. Bazaars were closed. Shops shuttered. Her sister was getting married, and there was nowhere to buy dowry items, Qyz jasaýy . Necessity sparked courage: “Why not sew them myself?” she thought. The first turbans she made were gifts for sisters, then friends, then customers. She stitched late into the nights, nursing a baby with one hand, guiding fabric with the other. She joined the Bastau Business course in 2018, walking home late in the evenings, holding onto new hope. “That’s when I realized I love sewing,” she says. Later, a training by Ainur Tursynbayeva opened a new world: government grants. The idea that the state could support her dream felt unbelievable. But she dared.

She wrote her own business plan, struggling through fear, through words on paper that did not yet feel real. She applied for a grant with a sample: a small quilt, körpeshe25, embroidered with qos qarlyğaş26 patterns and cultural memory. The jury loved it. “If you continue,” they told her, “you will go far.” When she received the confirmation, two million tenge, she froze. Relief and shock arrived together. “Sometimes you work so hard to get something, but when you finally have it, you don’t know what to do next,” she says. Yet she moved forward. She bought industrial equipment, her lifelong dream. “I always tell my children: dreams do come true. Write them down. Believe.” Her atelier started at home, cramped, loud, interrupted by children’s needs. Orders increased, including one from the city court. Sleepless nights became a routine. “I worked nonstop for four weeks, no weekends, nothing,” she remembers. “My back hurt so badly some mornings I couldn’t get out of bed.”

There were days she cried into her husband’s shoulder. He didn’t understand at first, he thought she was “just at home.” But eventually, he saw the truth. “I told them: I can’t do everything alone. We are a team.” Today, he cooks when needed, and the children help clean. That small shift, shared labour, became a form of love. Her health, meanwhile, remained a complex companion. She tries yoga now, and listens to motivational podcasts while sewing. She sees a psychologist. She practices jürekpen qai rattyñ tepe-teñdigi - a balance between jurek (heart) and qairat (will). Her body may tire quickly, but her aqyl (mind) and creative fire burn brightly. Entrepreneurship reshaped her identity. “Before, I was easily irritated, taking everything personally,” she says. But business forced her to grow, to delegate, to see beyond her limits. She learned that ideas expand when shared. After an entrepreneurship event hosted by the Academy of Women’s Entrepreneurship, investors admired her pillows but questioned her pricing: “You work so much… and you earn so little.” It stung. It enlightened. She now dreams not of survival but of scale, a workshop with many employees, a business where creative vision leads and hands support.

There were missteps too. She once applied, and won, two government tenders: one for deforestation services, another for electrical panel installation. Both required physical labor beyond her capacity. Others asked why a woman, especially one with health challenges, entered such fields. “They told me, ‘This is not a woman’s job.’” She laughs at that memory now, but acknowledges the burnout that followed. Even ambition needs boundaries. Yet she never stops seeking growth: new grants, new expansion routes, new ideas. She is learning to delegate, “Working alone keeps you small,” her mentors say. She now believes them. What gave her strength through every chapter? Family, especially her mother and sisters. Her mother’s disappearance years ago tore open an emotional wound she still tends to. Her sisters were the ones who helped pay for treatment when money was short. She often repeats:

Despite everything, she feels blessed. “Alhamdulillah,” she says often, with sincerity. Her faith anchors her through uncertainty. She sees illness not as a punishment but a teacher, reminding her to value life, to stop suppressing feelings, to claim joy. In her words, “Do what you love. We spend so much of our lives working. Let it be something that gives you life.” Her impact extends beyond fabric and thread. She preserves Qazaq traditional crafts, supports other seamstresses through outsourcing, and inspires women who fear their health limits their future. She is reshaping what disability, often invisible in her case, looks like in Qazaqstan. Not pity. Not limitation. Possibility

She still dreams big. Recently, she showed her collection at the AWE Central Asian Summit. Mass production or highend custom tailoring? She hasn’t decided. But she knows one thing: “I need people. A business needs a team.” This journey, marked by illness, burnout, joy, and continuous rebirth, reflects Abai’s Tolyq Adam: the unity of aqyl (mind), jurek (heart), and qairat (will). Her aqyl (mind), in strategy and planning. Her jurek (heart), in every stitch she places into someone’s celebration. Her qairat (will), when she keeps moving, even in pain. Meruyert’s life is proof that even when the body falters, the spirit can sew its way back to wholeness, one stitch of hope at a time.

Meruyert Yussupova embodies this principle through her unwavering commitment to growth: a PhD student while raising three children, building an inclusive school, and continuously developing new teaching approaches. Her entrepreneurship began not from ambition but from compassion, yet she refused to remain limited by her initial knowledge. She sought training, mentorship, community, adaptation of methods for visually impaired children, and better systems of delegation, every step grounded in humility and the desire to serve.

Her life illustrates Abai’s belief that a teacher must be both a seeker of knowledge and a custodian of care. She does not perform education as a ritual or chase prestige; instead, she treats learning as a moral responsibility. Through self-discipline, she sustains her faith in the value of education, in children’s futures, and in her own evolving capabilities.

Before she ever imagined herself as a business owner, Meruyert thought of herself as a quiet, capable girl who liked languages and avoided the spotlight. She grew up in a traditional Qazaq family where respect for elders was unquestioned and daughters were expected to be modest, diligent, and close to home. English came easily; she won school competitions and later chose “International Relations” at university largely because of that gift. But even then she never pictured a classroom full of children calling her “teacher,” much less an educational center with her name on the door. “In childhood, I never wanted to be a teacher and didn’t plan to go into business at all,” she recalls. “It all happened naturally.”

At university she married young and became a mother while still a student. By the time she graduated, her first child was two. She did what seemed sensible: looked for a proper office job in her field. They lived in Almaty, renting an apartment, paying for daycare, and watching their salaries disappear on the first of every month. “Our salaries, combined with my husband’s, barely covered expenses,” she says. The days were long; the evenings were rushed; her body started to protest in the only way it knew how, frequent illnesses, hospital visits, a constant sense of running on empty. Yet even in those years another life was quietly forming. To earn a little extra, she tutored English. At first it was simply a side job, a way to buy diapers and groceries without counting coins. But these hours with students felt different: lighter, more alive. Later, when the family moved to Issyk to live with her parents and she was commuting one to two hours each way back to the city, acquaintances there invited her to teach in a new educational center. The schedule was flexible, the pay similar to the office job, and her son was nearby. She agreed.

The pattern repeated when they later moved to Talgar. With a second child now in the family, she met another center owner, this time a special educator who worked with a psychologist and speech therapist. “We started talking, she learned I taught English, and suggested I open a group,” Meruyert says. Students came again, just a few hours every other day. She still did not call it a career. She tried reselling goods, network marketing, and different “small business” schemes that promised quick money and freedom. None of them stuck. Her body kept reminding her that long commutes and fixed hours were costing her health. She was tired, her children were often sick, and “eventually, I decided it was time to leave.”

Then came quarantine. Offices closed, but her students said, “We still want to continue studying.” Talgar’s restrictions were softer, so she continued teaching. Suddenly she found herself at home she says, “but in winter, problems arose: the heating didn’t work.” Once again her body became the messenger, cold rooms, strain on her already fragile vision. She knew she had to move.

Her diagnosis is serious: in her left eye she sees almost nothing, officially a thirddegree disability with 25–50 percent loss of work capacity. Dry air, artificial light, long hours at the computer trigger headaches and high blood pressure. About once a month she has to stop everything and take sick leave for several days. For years this diagnosis lived like a shadow, something she managed but didn’t talk about. It affected how others saw her too. “People often thought I was arrogant because I didn’t greet them … I simply couldn’t see them,” she explains. Teachers said she had a “stern look.” She carried those misunderstandings quietly.

The move from the unheated building led to a bigger space, four rooms in a residential block that fit her growing classes. Students kept coming; her third child was born; and she understood that she could no longer do everything alone. She began hiring teachers, step by step. At the same time, her disability brought an unexpected opening. Teaching at the Blind Society’s building, she met Aidos, a young man with a more severe visual impairment who had won a grant to teach children English. He invited her to join the project.

“Before that, I had never thought about teaching children with visual impairments,” she admits. But as they worked together, she realized she could adapt her methods. She already needed large-font assignments for herself; she simply extended the same practice to the children. Together they developed a program for visually impaired students, spread the word in Talgar, and groups quickly filled. The town, long home to many people with low vision since Soviet resettlement policies, responded. Parents brought their children to a teacher who not only knew English but also understood what it meant to squint at a page and feel the world blur. “That’s when I first felt that my experience and my diagnosis could be useful to others,” she says. From then on she positioned her center as inclusive, welcoming both typically developing children and those with disabilities. Entrepreneurship, for Meruyert, did not start with a business plan. Her individual entrepreneur (IE) was opened almost accidentally, at her brother’s request — he needed a registration to sell goods in a shop and could not do it under his own name. “I just said, ‘Okay, I’ll open it under my name,’ and I did,” she laughs. Later, when she wanted to formalize her own work, that random decision became a lucky foundation. She now had the legal status to sign contracts, apply for grants, and grow.

After quarantine she decided to open her own center. There was no capital, no savings. Near her house stood an old building of the Blind Society, a leftover from Soviet times. The rent was modest, 30–40 thousand tenge. The space was in bad shape, but her husband, friends and relatives came together with paint, tools, and time. The walls brightened; tables appeared; children started to arrive. “Everything was going well,” with her husband and children, waking up when they wanted, eating breakfast together, taking walks and picnics. “It was a wonderfully warm time,” she remembers. “I thought, ‘Why didn’t I choose this as my main work before?” Her illnesses eased; the constant inflammation and fatigue simply faded. This was the first quiet turning point: her heart telling her where it actually felt at peace

The growth came with lessons. She remembers worrying intensely when rent was due and money was short. For a week she was anxious, thinking about borrowing. Then she simply phoned the landlord, explained, and heard, “It’s okay, if you’re late, no problem.” The solution had been a two-minute conversation. “Sometimes the solution is right nearby,” she reflects. “We’re just afraid to ask.” When noise conflicts arose with a neighboring music studio, she agonized over construction costs until discovering that her own neighbor was a builder with leftover materials. He built a wall and allowed her to pay later. Again, the circle of support widened when she dared to name the problem. Behind the scenes, a web of kin and friends holds her up. Her husband is “very understanding and doesn’t expect me to handle all the household duties.” Her mother, who does not work, picks the children up from school and kindergarten. Her brother, neighbors, and friends fix computers, hang posters in the evenings when she is shy to advertise in daylight, and clean new premises before opening. “Moments like these are very important — you feel the support, realize you’re not alone,” she says. Her business is not a story of a solitary hero but of shared will, a collective will that keeps her going when her body says “stop.”

Systemic barriers appear more in the shape of bureaucracy and design flaws than overt discrimination. She has faced no direct refusals or hostility, and in Talgar, where many visually impaired people live, attitudes are generally calm and accepting. In fact, her status sometimes opens doors: the Employment Center extended youth internship support once they learned she was an entrepreneur with disabilities, and local sponsors supply New Year gifts and busy boards for children “without asking for documents, just because they want to support.” But she is clear-eyed about the limitations of current programs. Small grants of one to one and a half million tenge, with heavy reporting requirements and no allowance for rent, “aren’t very effective for beginner entrepreneurs with disabilities,” she argues. Competition is fierce; paperwork is mountains; and many businesses slowly suffocate under rent and salary costs. Larger grants, like the seven million she later won for her inclusive English methodology, feel genuinely transformative: easier reporting, online systems, real opportunity to invest in interactive boards and equipment. She dreams of policies that couple funding with strong training and mentorship, and of unused Soviet-era buildings renovated and offered to small businesses on low or zero rent.

Over time, Meruyert has rebuilt not only her center but also herself. She used to burn out regularly, arriving home so exhausted she could not move, torn between guilt toward her children and obligations to students and her new PhD program. “I used to think I had to do everything myself, as if no one could handle it the way I could,” she says. Gradually, through lectures, training and painful experience, she learned to delegate: one teacher manages Instagram, another handles parent communication, someone else takes payments, and a young accountant deals with taxes she openly dislikes. She writes problems down on paper, breaking them into pieces. When the pressure spikes — headaches, rising blood pressure, or emotional overload — she now allows herself to cancel a meeting, stay home, cook, clean slowly, or just sit in silence listening to meditations on YouTube. “Sometimes you just need to stop, sit, think, and everything becomes clearer,” she says. Entrepreneurship has also reshaped her sense of identity. As a schoolgirl she longed to be class leader but could not say the words “choose me.” At university she stayed silent when she wanted to speak. She did not know how to refuse requests, even when they drained her. Now she says, “I can clearly say what I want. I can take initiative, I can refuse if I feel I can’t handle it. And I really like it — feeling more confident and brave.” Her disability, once a source of hidden complexes, occupies less and less space in her mind. People close to her know; others she no longer feels obliged to explain herself to. And there is an unexpected gift: on stage or in front of a group, she doesn’t really see faces. “I don’t see their reactions, so I don’t get nervous,” she smiles. Where others are overwhelmed by the gaze of a crowd, her blurred vision shields her, letting her aqyl (mind) focus on the message, her jurek (heart) on the children.

Her days now start around nine at the center. She teaches her own classes, then shifts into administrator mode: documents, grant applications, perstudent funding programs, coordination with NGOs for sports events and inclusive projects. In the afternoon she returns to teach, record videos, meet her team. Two evenings a week she attends PhD classes. Between it all she tries to carve time for her three children (thirteen, eight, and two years old) to talk, walk, and ski in the nearby mountains. She dreams of contracts with the British Embassy and InterPress, of taking students to international competitions and summer language camps, of one day building a network of schools. But success, for her, is measured less in scale than in the faces of children who win contests, raise test scores, or simply start speaking confidently in English or Qazaq. “For me, success is primarily my students’ results,” she says. When she advises other entrepreneurs with disabilities, her words weave together mind, heart and will. First, educate yourself: understand finances, marketing, management, not only theory but practice. Second, do not put your disability on a pedestal, expecting the state to solve everything. “Use all the opportunities offered by the government and organizations, but don’t depend on them,” she insists. Apply for grants and loans, but also have a plan B for moving forward on your own. And finally, she reminds them gently that it is all right not to manage everything at once, that rest is part of work, and that solutions often appear the moment you dare to ask for help.

Looking back, she would change many tactical decisions, she laughs at how much money she once spent on new furniture in a space she knew had heating problems, but she would not undo the path itself. Her life as an entrepreneur has turned a quiet, partly sighted young woman who doubted her right to lead into a Tolyq Adam in motion: a person whose mind plans, whose heart includes children others overlook, and whose will keeps taking small daily steps toward a more inclusive future. In Talgar, in a bright center by the highway, children with and without disabilities gather around large-print worksheets and busy boards, learning languages and, quietly, learning that difference is normal. Through them, Meruyert’s journey becomes more than a business. It becomes a living lesson in how a person can move from survival to wholeness, and how one woman’s partial sight can open a wider vision for inclusion in Qazaqstan.

What Abai calls constancy of purpose, Mukhtar calls simply “doing things properly.” He believes that if knowledge is rooted in an honorable vessel, its fruit will sustain a family, and even a country, through unimaginable transformations. Abai instructs us not to abandon a truth we have fought for, “even on pain of death.” Mukhtar lived that creed through storms of economic collapse and even after his heart failed him. Disability forced him to move slower, but not to abandon the knowledge and dignity that had shaped him. He continued to trade after surgery, refusing to see limitations as defeat. Word Thirty-Two speaks of firmness in defense of one’s views, to preserve reason and honor. Mukhtar defended trust, honesty, and responsibility not through argument or rhetoric, but through example. He valued knowledge that served people, not knowledge that “simply confuses people,” as Abai warns against. He never pursued wealth to show he was superior; he worked so his children would never feel the hunger he once feared

Mukhtar’s story is not simply survival. It is a profound example of what Abai saw as the highest form of learning: knowledge rooted in conscience, applied with courage, and carried with unwavering will. Through his disability, his resilience, and his steadfast integrity, he shows what it means to be a man whose learning serves not only himself, but his family, his community, and the dignity of his nation.

Mukhtar Tarbagatayev grew up believing that life was supposed to be simple. In 1960s Soviet Qazaqstan, a man’s path was laid out before him long before he took his first step: go to school, work in a warm factory or office, receive your wages on time, retire with dignity, and watch your children repeat the same pattern. That was the promise, stability in exchange for loyalty. He remembers that period like a distant dream now. “Under the Soviet Union we worked indoors, in warmth, with good conditions,” he says. The future felt solid. His world had walls and rules, and none of them hinted that one day he would be hauling sacks of potatoes across a border just to keep his family fed.

Then history struck, sudden, cold, merciless. In 1990, everything collapsed at once. Factories shut overnight. Wages stopped. People were sent home with nothing except the words: unpaid leave. “Since we had to make a living somehow,” Mukhtar recalls, “we all went to the market.” There was no time for pride; hunger makes decisions for you. If you wanted to eat, you body froze in the cold, but his purpose stayed burning. “We planned carefully,” he says. “We never chased every last coin.” While some traders spent profits on showy celebrations or cars to mask the insecurity inside, Mukhtar and his friends spent nights calculating, saving every extra tenge, investing in the next shipment of goods

They had no phones, no guidance, no safety net. But they built trust, and that became the real capital of the 90s. “The first and most important thing was mutual trust,” he says. They gave goods on consignment, often without even IOUs. If someone made a promise, that was enough. In those years, a handshake was worth more than a contract stamped by a broken state. Of course, betrayal exists everywhere. “There were many who took goods and couldn’t pay.” When that happened, they did not fight, did not chase, did not threaten. “We entrusted such people to God,” he says quietly. Stress already weighed heavily; they could not afford hatred on top of exhaustion.

Day after day, Mukhtar stood in the open cold, “from morning till evening”, writing every transaction carefully in a big ledger. After hours at the stall, they loaded goods into a car and distributed them across towns before night fell. Competition was fierce, margins tiny, two or three tenge on a sack of flour. But they treated every customer as if their dignity depended on it. “We didn’t squeeze people,” he says. “We sold with the mindset of: what is allotted will sell.

With every frozen morning and every long drive, Mukhtar’s character sharpened. Entrepreneurship taught him the truth had to trade. If you wanted to survive, you had to become something entirely new, an entrepreneur. Qazaqstan in the 1990s was chaos wrapped in winter. Inflation devoured money faster than hands could earn it. The currency changed again and again, tenge replacing rubles, then tenge collapsing in value. “No matter how much you worked,” he says, “inflation burned it up.” He and others hauled food from Russia, potatoes, sugar, flour, carrying it by the bag, one aching trip at a time. “Production in Qazaqstan had stopped. We hauled in everything from Russia.”

This wasn’t entrepreneurship as textbooks describe it. It was survival in a collapsing country, where the rules changed daily, and the ground shifted underfoot like melting ice. But even in this instability, Mukhtar discovered something steady within himself: qairat (will). His about money, how hard it is to earn cleanly, how easy it is to lose foolishly. It taught him to read people, to stay vigilant, to adapt faster than fear. It strengthened his reasoning, and his compassion. It taught him that success without integrity is not success at all. But the body, unlike the heart, has limits. Cold seeped into his bones year after year, the roads aged his spine, stress gnawed at his heart. “Because I was constantly on the road, my heart was damaged,” he says. He knew something was wrong, but the stalls didn’t allow sick days, and bills didn’t wait for surgeries. Still he pushed his body to obey a will that refused surrender. Then one day, the body pushed back and from 2001 he was officially granted disability status. Life forced him to pause, but only for a moment. “I carried on in trade,” he says. He still needed to be the man his family relied on. Disability was not a sentence, it was a test. It asked: What does strength mean to you now? Mukhtar answered not with speeches, but with continued action. In 2014, he had a heart surgery and then he need to stop working and business was sold.

He is part of a generation he describes with pride: “We people born in 1960–61 have lived through two centuries and many phases.” Soviet order. Post-Soviet chaos. Rebuilding. They were not trained for entrepreneurship, but they did it anyway. They were not taught resilience, but lived it daily. They were not told their efforts would build an independent Qazaqstan, but they did. Mukhtar’s wife was his anchor in every storm. “My steadfast helper was my spouse,” he says with gratitude that softens his voice. She managed the household, protected his health when he did not, and raised the children while he chased income for the family’s survival. Together, they were an unbreakable partnership, a union of sacrifices and shared victories. “The children studied well and took care of the home themselves,” he adds proudly. His heart never stopped being a father’s heart, worrying constantly whether his children would have enough, whether they would grow up educated, upright, not needing to fight the same battles he did

Disability brought new humility. The man who once traveled tirelessly now had to listen to his doctor, rest, avoid cold, slow down. But instead of letting stillness turn into bitterness, he chose growth. After retiring, he attended courses. “For anyone who wants to work,” he says, “there’s plenty to do.” He still dreams, still learns, still keeps himself useful. He follows medical instructions carefully: medicine on time, fresh air, tests, supervision. He does not take life for granted, he guards it. Mukhtar speaks with deep respect for the state support he now receives. “They paid a disability pension and sent us to sanatoriums. When traveling, I pay only half the ticket price.” He is grateful, but he does not see support as something to depend on blindly. “Don’t just sit and wait for assistance,” he advises others with disabilities. “Do what you can do. Keep earning.” He believes agency is a form of dignity, and dignity is a form of strength.

He sees with pride how Qazaqstan has evolved, how markets that once operated like battlefields are now stable, how young people build businesses online, open cafés, and create technology. “Nowadays most work is done via the internet. Young people today have tremendous opportunities.” He helped lay the foundation they stand on. Their freedom rests on the sacrifices his generation made, a truth he states without needing credit. When asked about success, he doesn’t talk about money or power. His voice becomes softer, deeper: “To engage in business, you first need knowledge. If you learn planning, profit management, and financial literacy, you can achieve great success. A person must work from the heart, honestly. Don’t deceive anyone; treat everyone as your equal.” These are not business tips, they are philosophy earned through bruised hands and sleepless nights.

His disability, the scar left by years of unrelenting labor, is not a mark of tragedy, it is a mark of honor. It is a reminder of a life spent giving more than taking. It represents the weight he carried so his children could walk lighter. When he speaks, you hear no regret. When he looks back, he says only: “I feel I did everything properly.” This is success, a heart at peace with its own story. Mukhtar embodies Abai’s Tolyq Adam: aqyl (mind) in the choices he made, zhurek (heart) in the care he gave his family and customers, and qairat (will) in the way he refused to surrender his purpose even when his body faltered. He lived not for praise, but for responsibility. Not for selfglory, but for service.

He says he and his friends, now retirees, still check in on each other. They survived the same battlefield. They built trust that no inflation could erase. They are a generation that saw a world collapse and then helped build a new one, brick by brick, truckload by truckload. Qazaqstan’s independence was not only declared in politics, it was earned in markets, in cold mornings, in the determination of men who refused to let their families go hungry. Mukhtar’s story is not loud. It doesn’t shout in headlines. But it carries the quiet heroism of someone who lived through historical earthquakes and stayed standing. The disability that slowed his steps could not slow his purpose. The challenges that came from beyond his control did not break his faith in himself or others.

He is living proof that strength is not measured by how much a man can lift, but how much he can endure. That success is not measured by wealth, but by whether one can look at their life and say: “I stood for honesty. I cared for my family. I remained someone people could trust.” That is a real achievement. Sitting now with his grandchild, he witnesses a Qazaqstan he helped shape, a country more stable, more hopeful, where entrepreneurs no longer trade survival for dignity. He sees young people dreaming of opportunities he never had, and he smiles, because this is what he worked for. Mukhtar Tarbagatayev lived through instability and chose integrity. He lived through disability and chose dignity. He lived through uncertainty and chose perseverance. His story teaches that the true measure of a person is not the obstacles they face, but the will with which they continue to rise. In every phase of his life, Mukhtar chose to move forward. And in doing so, he carried his family, his community, and a piece of Qazaqstan forward with him.

Murat Abdumomynov grew up in a world he describes simply as “ordinary.” He was a healthy twenty-year-old student, on track for a technical degree, more interested in motion than in reflection. He loved the speed of change in the early 1990s: flights to Almaty or Sochi felt glamorous, China was opening, and the streets were a marketplace where energy turned into cash. Then a single rupture reordered everything. “I was a completely healthy guy,” he says. “At the age of twenty I was attacked and injured.” The injury cost him his sight over time. The institute expelled him, “physically unable” to continue in that program, and the identity he had expected to inhabit closed like a door behind him. Losing vision also stripped away the background noise that had once filled his days. He talks about this with startling clarity and without self-pity:

Focus did not erase grief, but it gave him a tool. He began again, not at a desk but in the hustle of the bazaar, the first wave of “buy-and-sell” that people then called business. He opened what was possible: a sauna, a gym, two kebab shops, ice-cream outlets, whatever would move. A Tatar5 friend taught him the basics, how to start, where to rent, who to pay, and Murat passed that knowledge on to others. “The first law,” he would tell young people, “is not to work for anyone. The second is to start where you get pleasure and profit.” He registered his company when needed, bought patents when it was simple to do so, and built a life in motion. A different turn came in 1995 in Taraz, when he and a small group of friends met leaders of public organizations, old men, some war veterans, who told the young to look after the elderly and to build something for people like themselves. The meeting redirected Murat’s ambition from individual survival to collective purpose. They founded the Youth Society of Disabled People in Taraz to defend the interests of 16–35-year-olds who did not fit neatly into categories designed for children or pensioners. And then in 2005 they opened the same organization in Astana. Education, culture, leisure, sport, he repeats these four words as a refrain because they make a life. The organization would be the place where a newly injured 19-year-old could walk in and be told, like in a good supermarket, “Here are the services; choose what you need.”

The path was not linear. In the 2000s, after entrepreneurship programs shifted and opportunists multiplied, Murat was scammed. “It’s life experience,” he shrugs. “Good that I lost only money. Others lost shops, houses, cars.” Before that, he had already tasted the dizzying heights of quick wealth: in 1992 he and a friend made a million and then, as he says with disarming honesty, “drank for six months.” The emptiness that followed became an education of a different kind. He met an old man in his kebab shop who had no money for food and said he was preparing for Hajj6 . Murat assumed it was a con, this was the 90s, but he listened, gave him the meal, even added $500 for the journey, and asked that the man bring back zamzam7 water and a tasbih (prayer beads). The man returned the next day with a story of having once been one of the richest in Dushanbe and losing his soul to money. The encounter unsettled Murat. “We had everything,” he recalls of himself and his friends, “but inside there was emptiness.” Soon after, an imam told him plainly: “What you’re doing is temporary. You were made for charity.” Something shifted. Not a conversion moment with trumpets, more like a slow light dawning. He began to rebuild his days around discipline and faith.

Now his mornings start at four or five. Exercises. Qigong. Athletics. He studies Arabic in Braille —“a week ago I started reading” — because he wants to read the Qur’an in the original and because, as he puts it, so much of philosophy and medicine crossed into Arabic and radiated outward. By nine he is at work. At noon, if possible, he trains again. In the evenings he walks two hours, breathes, and clears the mind. He talks about burnout with a smile:

He meditates, recites zikr (a form of devotional remembrance), and resets priorities. Calmness is his strategy: “Only calmness in harmony. When you are calm, you achieve something.” The conditions around him are far from calm. He lists barriers with clinical precision. Meetings where all materials are on paper or slides but gadgets are banned, “like taking the wheelchair from a wheelchair user,” so he must wait for someone to whisper a summary in his ear. Grant programs that look open until you get to the collateral clause. Training schemes designed by “armchair experts” who have never sold a thing, consultants who lecture without taking questions, and an ecosystem that often funnels people into narrow roles, “plasterer, painter, shoemaker,” as if that were the full range of human capability. At official events, he notes the scheduled agenda for speeches for 15 minutes and in reality, minister 30 minutes, vice-minister 30, MP 30, department head 30 and when it comes to people with disabilities, they rush them and say that meeting time is over. “What is this if not discrimination? There is no quality dialog or debates to solve problems because we can’t always write our thoughts on paper.” The problem behind the problem, he says, is fragmentation: organizations divided by category — deaf, blind, general disability — each strong inside its fence, weak together. Unity would alter the terms of the conversation.

His answer is pragmatic and, in its way, radical. Make access to experiment easy again. Let people buy a simple sixmonth patent for 30,000 tenge and try a seasonal kiosk, a small rental, or a home service. If it works, extend it; if it fails, close and try again. “The state is still in profit,” he argues; the citizen learns without being crushed by compliance. He wants social entrepreneurship to move from token projects to production that matters: canned meat during winter culls, saline and disposables for neighboring health systems under strain, fast food that is actually fast nutrition. He believes the future belongs to mini-factories and robots, “They work at night; 1/100 error,” and to joint programs that put Qazaqstan on markets where there is real demand. This is how he thinks: from a blind man’s attention to detail to a strategist’s scale of imagination.

Yet the heart of his work sits closer to home. Murat organizes life-giving leisure for his members: cinema days, theater visits, pools, equestrian sessions. He insists this can be arranged for free through partnership if you approach businesses “through the prism of nobility.” He refuses to beg. Instead, he translates the language of profit into the language of meaning. “Your business brings joy, success, happiness, love to people,” he tells owners; “that is the best feeling.” When it works, and it often does, he watches people laugh, dance, sing; he sees energy return to bodies dulled by isolation. He calls this a business project too, an investment in people. And he is careful to model a discipline of giving without spectacle. “It’s not customary for us to advertise charity,” he says. “The poor know who helps.

There is, in his way of speaking, a constant negotiation between aqyl (mind), zhurek (heart), and qairat (will). He thinks hard about systems and incentives; he protects his spirit from bitterness with humor and faith; and he moves, even when the path is clogged, step by step. When he talks about money now, it is with a mature respect: “Successful people love money. They count it, talk to it, ask it to bring more.” But money has to be attached to a transcendental goal, or else it curdles into the emptiness he remembers too well. His advice to a young entrepreneur with a disability is crisp:

Murat’s identity has been rebuilt, not erased and redrawn but layered. He remains an entrepreneur, searching and testing, alert to demand. He is also a founder who has stepped above the swirl, a mediator who brings cinemas and circuses and swimming pools into view for people accustomed to being told “no.” He is a student starting fresh with dots under his fingers, learning letters his eyes cannot see. He is a believer who learned that generosity fills the jug with fresh water as you pour. He is a critic of bad design who still sits at the table and answers questions, even an hour late, because he had to wait for someone to read the slide aloud. He is a man who once partied away a million and now walks two hours each evening to quiet the mind.

The broader impact of this life is both measurable and intangible. Measurable in the 45–50 members served on a servicemodel basis, in the partnerships that open doors to public institutions free of charge, in the policy arguments sharpened around patents and accessible devices, in the scientific program he is assembling to study how physical activity changes health outcomes. Intangible in the way his calm resolves panic in a room; in the way he names his blindness with dignity, “the light is off,” and refuses the language of pity; in the way his insistence on joy reframes what inclusion can look like in Qazaqstan. To sit with Murat is to feel a quiet recalibration. He does not dramatize his losses or polish his victories. He speaks with the steadiness of someone who has learned to align mind, heart, and will, so that work is not merely survival but a form of moral coherence.

“Business is simply a person being businesslike in everything,” he says. In his narrative, that means counting receipts, yes, but also counting smiles at the end of a cinema night; arguing about cash registers and also about dignity; learning Arabic dots and also teaching a city to open its doors. The light that went out in his eyes turned on, elsewhere, in his purpose. And the city is brighter for it.

Moreover, Abai distinguishes between aspirations rooted in ego (wealth, status, reputation) and those rooted in humanity. Saida exemplifies the latter: her aspiration matures into service, compassion, and the desire to uplift others. When she stands before newly amputated teenagers and their parents with the message, “You cannot grow a new arm or leg. But you can grow a new life,” she embodies Abai’s call to aspire toward what elevates the human spirit. Her dreams, building a stable home, raising her sons, supporting families, and creating an inclusive rehabilitation space, echo Abai’s belief that true aspiration is measured not by what one gains, but by the goodness one cultivates within and around oneself. In this way, Saida’s entire life becomes a living interpretation of Word 44: aspiration as moral striving, inner clarity, and the quiet courage to grow a meaningful life.

Saida Kenessarina’s life began with a shock that struck her family long before she could speak, but its echoes would one day shape her into a woman of rare strength, luminous resilience, and a deep sense of purpose. She was only four when a sudden fever took hold of her small body, sending her into the ICU where her parents, young, frightened, and unprepared, were not allowed to see her for nearly two weeks. By the time her mother finally caught sight of her again, Saida was barely alive. Her arm and leg had wasted away. Her skin was marked with dark patches where medications had scorched her fragile body. Doctors from different cities arrived, convening medical boards, searching for answers they could not find. In the end, they could not save her limbs. “Praise be to Allah, I survived,” Saida says today, with a clarity that contains both memory and grace.

Her parents were young, her mother only twenty-seven, and unprepared for the future that suddenly appeared before them. Yet they did not crumble. Saida’s survival became a task of love, persistence, and quiet courage for her parents, who would raise her not as a fragile child but as someone who must learn to stand in the world with dignity. “They didn’t focus on my deficiencies,” she says. “They raised me to be independent.” That choice, made in the chaos of hospitals and uncertainty, would later become the foundation of Saida’s own resilience.

When she was five, they traveled to Leningrad to make her first prosthetics. She remembers entering the giant building, rising in the elevator, and seeing for the first time many children like her, some without arms, some without legs, some without both. And they were joyful. Laughing. Moving through hallways in wheelchairs. “I remember thinking, ‘Thank God I at least have one arm and one leg.’” Out of that moment emerged the first seed of gratitude that would later mature into what Abai calls the heart’s moral clarity. Even as a child, Saida sensed that since Allah left her this life, she must live it fully.

Back home, life unfolded with both tenderness and pain. In kindergarten, some parents whispered that she might “irritate” their children. But her mother, stubborn, fierce, guided by a mother’s heart, refused to let anyone shame her daughter. She brought Saida to school herself and made sure teachers protected her. Saida grew up in a regular school, with regular children, doing her best to blend in. She hid her prosthetics behind long sleeves and skirts, dreaming only of walking without limping. “I practiced walking from the entrance to the trash bin like a model,” she remembers, laughing softly. “Trying to show everything was fine.”

Her teenage years brought new challenges. When other girls started wearing heels, she cried because her prosthetic foot was flat. She longed for summer T-shirts and swimming, but the thought of exposing her prosthetics filled her with dread. These were the private wounds, hidden beneath fabric, behind smiles, that shaped her adolescence. “I cried into my pillow,” she says. “I had to be strong; I couldn’t show weakness.” Then, as if in answer to her prayers, a prosthetics center in Almaty invited her to test new technology that allowed heels. She remembers standing, walking, and feeling, for the first time, the thrill of looking like every other girl her age. There were only two or three girls in all of Qazaqstan with prosthetics that allowed heels, and she was one of them. Her world brightened.

As she grew older, another shift happened, not in her body, but in her heart. When her younger sister was born, ten years her junior, Saida found herself carrying her tiny sibling to dance classes, caring for her on her own, shielding her from difficulty. “Let her have an easy life,” she prayed. “It’s okay that this happened to me.” This love for her sister softened her struggle. Gratitude replaced bitterness. Acceptance replaced pain. University followed, English translation, chosen because it allowed work despite her disability. She traveled alone for prosthetics since age sixteen, so independence was familiar. After graduation, she worked in Aksai, far from home. Her parents worried, but Saida managed everything: cooking, washing, daily routines, all with one hand and one leg. Life demanded creativity, and she met it with quiet determination

Marriage came, then motherhood at twenty-four. Her first son changed her entirely. “I stopped thinking about myself and focused on my child.” With one arm, she fed him, dressed him, soothed him. Her parents helped, especially with bathing. But Saida insisted on doing everything she could herself. Motherhood strengthened her sense of purpose. Her second son was born under far more difficult circumstances, in London, where she lived alone, waiting for visa documents. She had no family around her and cried many nights from exhaustion. But neighbors helped, and she pushed through. “Praise be to Allah,” she says. “I got through it.” She balanced classes, newborn care, commuting, and uncertainty with an inner steadiness that astonished everyone around her

Yet life brought more trials. She eventually separated from her husband and raised both sons alone. Employment became essential. She worked in auditing, engineering, quality control. She tried entrepreneurship once, opening an Individual Entrepreneurship (IE), but unstable income pushed her back into traditional employment. Still, the entrepreneurial spark never left her. Her long-term dream is to open an inclusive rehabilitation center, one where people with disabilities, the elderly, and children can interact naturally. “So people know that among ordinary life, there are people like me.” But Saida’s most remarkable journey was internal: the path to self-acceptance. For years she could not show herself without prosthetics online. She covered up for the comfort of others, feeling responsible not to “disturb” them. Only three years ago did she reach what she calls “100% acceptance.” On hot days now, she sometimes goes out without a prosthetic. “If I’m comfortable, that’s enough,” she says. “Why hide?”

Her Instagram blog, running for nearly a decade, became a window into her life. What began as random posts slowly turned into a source of motivation for people across Qazaqstan and even abroad. “People said I was strong, had will. At the time, I didn’t realize it. Only when I fully accepted myself did I understand.” She visits people in hospitals, especially those newly amputated. Recently, she met a 10th-grade girl who had lost her leg in a train accident. Saida came not only for the girl, but for the girl’s mother, knowing too well that parents also carry a grief they cannot speak. Saida showed them her own amputated arm and leg, stood before them not as a symbol of tragedy but as proof that life not only continues, it can shine

She tells them, “You cannot grow a new arm or leg. But you can grow a new life.” Acceptance, she believes, is the turning point between despair and renewal. Her coaching is informal, born from lived experience rather than certification. People come to her one by one, through her blog, through word of mouth, through quiet requests for help. She listens, advises, shares her story. She helps them unlock their own inner will, which Abai says allows a person to move from mere survival toward moral wholeness. Motherhood continues to give her strength. Her younger son once said in an English class interview that his best friend is his mother. When the teacher shared the video, Saida cried. “We talk about everything,” she says. “I let them make their own choices.” She believes that children learn not from lectures but from watching how their parents live. And Saida lives with joy. “Waking up makes me happy. The sky, clouds, rain, coffee, everything.”

Of course, there are fears. Financial uncertainty. Occasional discomfort with her prosthetics. Moments of sadness.

She has done extraordinary things, parachuting, climbing part of Mount Elbrus, learning to swim despite missing limbs, traveling alone across countries, driving with one hand. But she considers her greatest achievement something small: the ability to walk outside in a T-shirt, prosthetics visible, without fear. Looking back, she says she wishes she had learned financial literacy earlier. Looking forward, she hopes for her own home, a stable future for her sons, a loving marriage when Allah wills, and her rehabilitation center. When asked what she wants to tell others with disabilities who dream of starting a business, she answers simply: “Move forward. Don’t look back. If you have the desire, make it real.”

At the heart of Saida’s journey is a profound embodiment of Abai’s Tolyq Adam: the harmony of mind,heart, and will. She moves through life with reason guiding her, compassion extending from her, and willpower carrying her through every trial. She is a woman shaped not by what she lost, but by what she built, courage, self-respect, gratitude, purpose. And through her story, she offers Qazaqstan not just an example of resilience, but a vision of inclusion rooted in humanity, dignity, and love.

Abai also asks: “What can you talk about with a man who does not know the value of words?” Sanash knows the value of words deeply, the hurtful ones that once stripped him of dignity, and the encouraging ones that gave him strength to build a future. That is why he speaks gently but firmly now, using his words to raise others, respecting every worker, uplifting every soul that joins his organization.

His life shows that becoming a Tolyq Adam, a complete human, is not a gift, but a lifelong education. Through trial and observation, through pain and purpose, through listening and responding with courage, he has become an example of Abai’s teaching: a man who continues to grow, and in doing so, helps others grow too.

Sanash Yechshanov grew up in an aul (village) where life was simple and everyone knew each other by name. In the village, boys spent their days riding horses, running across fields, and helping their families with whatever work needed doing. When he was seven, one of those ordinary days changed the course of his life. He fell from a horse and broke his wrist. It seemed minor at first, the kind of injury village children often shrugged off. But a medical mistake led to gangrene, and his arm had to be amputated.

The adults around him were devastated. His mother cried at night, whispering, “What will happen to you?” Yet the boy himself refused to treat it as a tragedy. He learned to do things differently, not less. Over time, the stump became part of his body’s map, not a mark of shame. His wife now jokes, “I can’t even imagine you with two arms,” and Sanash laughs, telling people, “It’s nothing terrible.” From early on, he began to practice the quiet harmony of mind, heart and will: thinking pragmatically about his limits, refusing self-pity, and pushing himself to move forward.

In the village everyone knew him, so no one treated him as “the disabled one.” He helped his father support the family, traded whatever they could buy and sell, and learned to hustle in the informal markets of the 1990s. They sold milk and sour cream, repaired old cars and resold them, carried bags from city to aul and back again. He wasn’t “a person with disability” then; he was simply Sanash, a hardworking son and husband who did what needed to be done.

The real shock came much later, when he and his wife decided to leave that rough but familiar life and move to Rudny. They wanted what his wife called a “normal life”: stable work, mornings at the office, evenings at home with their children. She quickly found a job in a store through recommendations. Sanash began visiting factory gates and offices, offering himself for any position – “even as a night guard.” At first the conversations went smoothly. He would talk, people nodded, everything seemed fine. Then they noticed his missing arm. Faces changed. Doors closed.

“For almost eight months,” he remembers, “I went around to different organizations, 168 169 | Abai’s Word Nineteen: On Learning Through Life | Abai’s Word Nineteen: On Learning Through Life but no one would hire me.” That was the first time he truly felt disabled. “I had been without an arm for seven years already, but only in Rudny I understood: this is what it means to be disabled in people’s eyes.” He discovered that in the post-Soviet city, where people didn’t know his history, his missing arm suddenly spoke louder than his character, skills, or experience.

One episode cut deeply. He put on his prosthesis and took a security job at a mill with a bathhouse. For two months he worked diligently. When the head of security found out he had no hand, he was immediately fired. “I was shocked,” he says. “I thought, how can this be? I am the same person. If someone attacks, even with two hands you are not guaranteed to do anything.” In that dismissal, he felt how a whole system quietly decided he was “less than,” no matter what he could actually do. With a small disability pension and his wife’s salary, they survived. But the experience left a scar. It also sowed the seed of his future mission: to ensure that other people with disabilities would not be pushed to the sidelines in the same way. Searching for some foothold, he went to the Rudnyi City Association of People with Disabilities. The organization was in a dilapidated former kindergarten building, surviving on random donations. The chairman, Viktor Pavlovich Kasatkin, welcomed him: “We have nothing – only this building. But if you want to help, you are welcome.”

Looking around at the empty rooms, Sanash’s aqyl (mind) kicked in. “We can’t just keep begging,” he said. “Let’s rent out some rooms. At least we’ll have some income.” They started slowly, one room at a time. The association took its first tentative steps away from charity and toward selfreliance. When Viktor Pavlovich suffered a heart attack and could no longer work, he insisted: “Only my successor will lead this organization,” and chose Sanash as the new chair. It was a turning point. The building had no equipment, not even a single computer. Determined not to return to a life of begging, he went to a businessman who sold computers and asked for help. The man replied coldly: “You disabled people are always begging. I’m tired of it.

That sentence struck him “to the very core.” Walking out of the shop, he made an inner vow: “This is the first and last time I will ever ask for something as a leader.” His jurek (heart) burned with hurt, but his qairat (will) transformed that hurt into resolve. Around that time, government procurement had just begun. Seeing a path, he scraped together money from his pension, borrowed what he could, and travelled to Almaty and Taraz to study tenders and social procurement. He sat in seminars, took notes with one hand, and passed certification exams. Eventually the association won its first tiny tender: reupholstering thirty chairs. They had no machinery, no tools, just willpower and a friend named Yerlan. “We spent the whole night figuring it out,” he recalls. “And we did it … by any means possible.” The profit was thirty-seven thousand tenge. It felt immense, not because of the amount but because it was, as he says, “honest money, earned by our own hands.” In that small success, the association shifted from passive recipients of pity to active producers of value. It was the beginning of an entrepreneurial journey that would reshape not only his identity, but the lives of dozens of others.

From that first tender, the projects multiplied. Sanash saw that the biggest barrier for people with disabilities was not only society’s prejudice but the lack of meaningful, accessible work. “How can they earn?” he asked himself. “Heavy physical labor is impossible for many, and not everyone can provide professional services.” So he designed businesses where tasks could be tailored to different abilities. With a 3-million-tenge grant from Samruk-Kazyna Trust, he launched a social auto service: ordinary drivers could rent a warm box with a lift and tools to work on their own cars for a small fee. Administrative jobs – greeting clients, registering time, calculating payments – were done by people with disabilities. No one had to lift heavy things; they managed the workflow using aqyl (mind) and communication. The project was so popular that they soon had queues and reservations, and expanded to six lifts.

Next came a laundry funded by the First President’s Fund, employing women with disabilities to wash linens for dormitories and private clients. Another grant allowed them to buy furniture-making equipment. Although bureaucracy later stalled that line due to certification requirements, it remained a proof of concept: they could build production, not just consume aid. He applied to the German embassy and obtained support to equip a hair salon. Even when they struggled to find hairdressers with disabilities, the equipment stayed ready. It was part of his broader vision that people with disabilities should look and feel dignified.

He knew that identity reconstruction often begins with small, visible signs: neat hair, manicured nails, a straight back. A cafeteria followed, created from their own funds in a building they now maintained themselves. Six women work there, serving around a hundred people a day, many from a nearby police department. The association also runs tenders for city maintenance: mowing grass, cleaning playgrounds, snow removal, welding and repair work. They opened a small taxi service where wheelchair users work as dispatchers. “Before, healthy girls were dispatchers, and there were constant conflicts when cars were late,” he smiles. “Now wheelchair users themselves manage the calls – they understand each other, and everything goes smoothly.”

From four staff members in a crumbling building, the association has grown to around forty-seven employees, about eighty percent of whom are people with disabilities. No one earns less than two hundred thousand tenge; drivers can earn up to three hundred fifty thousand or more. For fifteen years, Sanash has reinvested every tenge back into expanding opportunities, consciously choosing growth over personal comfort. This is his understanding of social entrepreneurship: not living from social order to social order, but building self-sustaining ventures where income circulates back into jobs and dignity

The work comes with stress. He jokes that January and February are his “depressive months,” when he lies awake wondering whether they will win tenders and keep all the jobs. The constant responsibility has cost him his teeth, “all eaten by nerves,” he says, and he often goes to bed thinking about heating bills and electricity for their two-story building. Yet his well-being rests on three pillars: his loving wife of almost thirty-seven years, his children and four grandchildren, and the sense of purpose he feels when someone walks into his office asking for work and walks out employed. His wife is his steady jurek (heart). She believed in him when no one else did. She travels with him to sanatoriums, keeps the home warm, and celebrates each small victory. She also supported him when a new calling appeared: Paralympic shooting. What began as a spontaneous try at a championship, he unexpectedly took third place, grew into serious training. Now he is a member of Qazaqstan’s national team, has travelled to seven countries competing, and is aiming for the 2028 Paralympics in Los-Angeles. Shooting meets his inner need for discipline and focus. It is another field where he refuses to let his body define his limits.

Despite his achievements, entrepreneur, deputy of the local maslikhat, national, he still feels the weight of societal attitudes. At the beach or swimming pool, he notices people staring at his missing arm “like I am an exhibit in a zoo.” Abroad, in European pools, he saw people with and without disabilities swim together without anyone looking twice. “Our problem is not the body,” he says, “it is the mindset.” That is why he speaks often about the need for education and visibility. For years he organized visits to schools with a group of people with severe disabilities. They sat in front of teenagers; some lacked arms, some legs, some fingers. They told the students: “We are trying, we are living, we want to work and be useful. And you, why are you giving up on life?” The children cried. In a society shaken by news of youth suicides, he hoped that at least one child would reconsider, would see life differently through the presence of these resilient adults.

Inside his own organization, he fights against dependency. When people come asking for flour, potatoes or cash because “before they gave us,” he answers: “Come and work.” He knows poverty and hunger; he once himself distributed donated sacks of food. But he believes that constant handouts kill initiative and teach children that survival comes from pleading, not effort. “How much do you really need?” he asks. “Even ten sacks won’t be enough. Better learn to earn.” And yet he remains generous. Each year his accountant shows that he has given away one or two million tenge in help, small amounts here and there, groceries delivered personally to families who truly struggle. He prefers to bring food rather than hand over cash that might be spent on alcohol. His compassion is firm, not indulgent.

In his dreams, there is one project that keeps returning: a dedicated sports hall for people with disabilities. For fifteen years, they have played sitting volleyball every Sunday at ten in the morning in a college gym, scheduled at a time when no one else is around. Men with prosthetic legs and arms drag themselves across the floor, laughing, shouting, feeling alive. When students occasionally walk in, they often freeze in shock. “We say we want inclusion,” he reflects, “but we hide in basements and borrowed gyms.” A hall of their own would be both a business, creating 10–15 new jobs for trainers and staff, and a symbolic home where bodies with disabilities are not hidden but normalized. Looking back, he knows his life has been shaped by the interplay of mind, heart and will. Mind helped him read tenders, design projects, and navigate bureaucracy even when officials “speak a different language.” Heart guided his insistence on respect, on never humiliating anyone, on creating spaces where a woman with epilepsy can reduce her seizures simply because she feels needed and calm. Will carried him through the humiliation of being told “you disabled people are always begging,” through sleepless nights over heating bills, through international competitions where a license for Paris slipped just out of reach

Asked if he is a happy man, he answers without hesitation: “Honestly, I am a very happy person.” Happiness for him is not the absence of pain or barriers but the presence of family, meaningful work, and the ability to say yes or no with integrity. “When as a father your word has weight, when you see your family walking the right path, that is the greatest treasure.” His measure of success is simple: creating jobs where people with disabilities earn real salaries, regain confidence, and start doing their eyelashes and hair not for others’ approval but because they feel worthy. Through his journey, the old Soviet idea of disability as deficit is quietly dismantled. In Rudnyi today, a network of services, e.g., auto lifts, laundry, cafeteria, taxi dispatch, testifies that people with disabilities are not objects of charity but subjects of economic and moral life. Young employees arrive withdrawn and leave transformed. Children in schools see men and women without limbs who still laugh, work, and love. Officials who once saw “beggars” now see a partner pushing for better policies.

Sanash’s life does not erase pain or injustice, but it rearranges them into a different pattern. Instead of being the man no one would hire “even as a guard,” he has become someone who can look at a person who walks into his office and say, with a quiet sense of fulfillment, “If you want to work … I will find something for you.” In that simple promise lies the deeper inclusion he has spent his life building: a Qazaqstan where worth is not measured by limbs, but by the work of the heart, the clarity of the mind, and the stubborn, steady courage of the will.

From the beginning, Ulan Inkarbekov was raised to believe that limitation was never a part of his name. He was born as a healthy baby and growing like any other child in a Soviet apartment courtyard. But a sudden illness when he was only six months old, rubella that spread across his tiny body, changed the course of his life. Doctors suspected meningitis and performed a spinal puncture. It was a time of rough procedures and limited technology. The damage to his spinal cord and nervous system led to cerebral palsy. His left side would never function like his right. His speech would be altered. His childhood would unfold with crutches and wheelchairs instead of free-running feet.

But Ulan does not perceive that moment as a tragedy, because his parents never allowed him to experience himself as “less.”

In his memory, he was simply a boy dreaming of roads stretching across continents, a boy who wanted to become a truck driver, seeing the world through movement. Or an architect, designing cities that rose from imagination to skyline. Those dreams were not childish fantasies, they were early expressions of inner will (qairat), an insistence on possibility.

School, however, reflected the Soviet view of disability, invisibility, sheltered pathways, limited expectations. Teachers removed him from classes they deemed pointless “for someone like him.” Drafting, music, foreign languages, struck from his education. “They said my hands were crooked,” he recalls. “Why teach him English? Where would he ever go?” It was a quiet but cruel erasure of identity, the state deciding dreams on behalf of a child. Yet those very denials planted a stubborn fire in him, “I will prove them wrong.”

Ulan’s parents spent years traveling the Soviet landscape searching for treatment, from Almaty to Moscow, from hospitals to miracle healers. “My mother exhausted herself,” he remembers. A neurologist in Moscow finally told her gently, “You must understand … your son will remain in this condition for life.” It was not a sentence, it was the moment his mother shifted from seeking a cure to building a future.

At home, Ulan learned that dignity did not depend on legs. He played, fought, studied, argued, like every other child. He learned to walk with crutches, and when he fell, he stood back up. Every step was an act of courage of the jurek (heart). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Qazaqstan stood on uncertain ground, a country changing faster than its people could comprehend. Ulan was 16 and wanted not just survival but independence. He began working from home, doing piecework assembly, envelopes, light switches, anything that allowed him to contribute. “That’s how I started working,” he says. “I wanted not only financial independence, but socialization.” Money was dignity. Work was identity.

The chaos of the 1990s pushed many into business, and Ulan saw opportunity where others saw disorder. He founded his first company, INKAR, in the grain industry. He helped sell grain and provided agricultural supplies. It was ambitious, but ambition was his native language. Later came a printing house producing cardboard packaging at a moment when Qazaqstan relied entirely on imports. They secured a contract with a tea company, a historic shift. Competition emerged quickly, so Ulan proposed a bold strategy: instead of cash payments, they would receive tea. He turned that tea into a brand: EDA, packaged by workers with disabilities. He built not only businesses, but systems of inclusion before such language even existed here. He created a workshop employing 45 people with disabilities, scales, sealing irons, human skill. At a major competition, their tea beat large corporate brands. For a moment, the future seemed bright and unstoppable.

But tea is a business that requires constant stock and advertising. Supply chains wavered. Borders changed. Partners withdrew. Twice the project had to close. Selling the equipment and releasing employees was one of the hardest days of his career. “You must never let anyone down,” he once promised himself, after a bank chairman granted him his first major loan with trust alone as collateral. That sentence became a core of his aqyl (mind), a principle shaping everything he builds.

Yet even in loss, Ulan does not dwell in regret. “Stress lasts five minutes for me,” he laughs. “Every problem has a solution. If you see a concrete wall, you can always go around it.” This refusal to collapse, this philosophical steadiness, is what Abai would call the unity of aqyl (mind), jurek (heart), qairat (will) becoming whole through struggle. Business doors were not easy to push open. “Partners look at you and think: what can someone with crutches do?” he says. Banks decline loans without ever stating the real reason. Building a bus company, developing routes, all stalled when outdated vehicles needed financing for renewal. Discrimination rarely speaks, but it acts.

“They say only ‘the commission refused.’ They never say why.” Ulan understands the duality of disability in Qazaqstan: obstacles and unexpected openings. Some officials help because they feel responsibility. Some because they have relatives with disabilities. Others simply out of sympathy. But he has never accepted pity as currency. He enters meetings with equal footing. “If you sat Donald Trump in front of me,” he says with a smile, “I would talk to him as an equal.” His entrepreneurial spirit eventually intersected with public advocacy. Leaders in the disability community recognized his strategic mind. His business skills translated into structural change. He became deputy in the district organization, then deputy in the city organization, and in 2022, he was elected Chairman of the Almaty City Society of People with Disabilities, overseeing support for 3,000 members across eight districts. He also leads the Qazaq Union of Organizations of People with Disabilities, with branches nationwide. His influence is international, Vice President in a global disability organization headquartered in Kyiv, representing Qazaqstan at seminars from Berlin to Rome

His work helped introduce InvaTaxi, personal assistant services, and employment practices that are now national standards. He helped open metaphorical doors, so others could enter countries of possibility. Still, he refuses to rest. “I get excited by ideas,” he says. “Once a business is running, I lose interest … I need the process of creating something new.” Creation is his oxygen. Even his dreams from childhood eventually found their form. He has now traveled to 35 countries. He never became an architect, but he approves accessibility designs shaping the city. “I believe I became one … just in another way.” This is identity reinvention at its most profound: the essence of the dream survives even when its shape changes. Qazaqstan’s past shaped him, but he fights so its future will not resemble its past

“In the Soviet Union, they locked us at home … There were no people with disabilities, we were made invisible.” That invisibility has slowly lifted, but remnants remain: stares on the street, hesitation to dine in a café run by staff with disabilities, parents pulling children away from wheelchairs and wiping their hands in fear. He sees these moments not as insults, but indicators of how much work remains. With each advocacy victory, a properly built ramp, a new legal protection, he feels moral fulfillment. He goes from one battle to the next within minutes. His work reshapes not only infrastructure, but hearts.

Entrepreneurship and activism are one path for him, the path of Tolyq Adam. He builds with intellect: master’s degree at 50, constant learning, strategic innovation. He leads with heart: offering free transportation to visitors with disabilities from other regions because “one wheelchair user is every wheelchair user’s responsibility.” And he rises with willpower: founding companies even when capital was scarce and expectations were lower than the ground he walked on. He dreams bigger now, and dreams for others. One major project underway will manufacture adult diapers in Qazaqstan, employing more than 25 workers with disabilities and keeping profits inside the country. The second: an eco-friendly electric taxi fleet employing 70 more. He imagines small production workshops and even inclusive tourism, buses to China where people with disabilities can shop freely, experience mobility, feel the world expanding.

He takes weekends to be with his children, and now a grandson, because dignity is incomplete without love. He teaches his daughter and son to see accessibility not as accommodation, but as normalcy. They invite him to places assuming access exists, because for them, inclusion is not a political stance, but a fact of family. And now, his dreams stretch further: “My ambition is to finish my career as Minister of Social Welfare,” he says calmly. This is not ego, it is the belief that those who understand struggle from within should write the laws that shape solutions.

He has advice for others with disabilities: “You must start with your own mind. Remove the thought that you are worse than others.” If one cannot enter a bus, he does not see a world that owes assistance, he sees a system that must be changed and insists on being part of that change. He teaches rights-claiming as active practice: take photos, collect receipts, go to court, and change the country case by case. He asks Qazaqstan for one thing: to remember that disability is not a distant issue.

Ulan believes in collective transformation, not through pity, but through participation. “Everything is in our hands,” he says. “We must prove we exist. Show we are capable. And then society will see us differently.” His life is a refutation of invisibility. A 16-year-old boy assembling envelopes became a national leader shaping policy. A child denied drafting lessons became an architect of accessibility. A man told he would remain dependent on built enterprises that provided independence to hundreds. His story reminds us: A person is never defined by what was taken from them, but by what they insist on building anyway. Ulan Inkarbekov lives not as an object of care, but as an author of change. And through him, Qazaqstan learns to become more whole.

Ulan Mussaev was born in the small town of Shu in the Zhambyl region, the eldest of four children, a boy whose life began under the heavy shadow of cerebral palsy. “Up to the age of twelve, I didn’t walk,” he recalled. “My legs and arms didn’t move, and even my speech was hard.”

His parents loved him, but the emotional center of his childhood was his grandmother and grandfather, two figures whose tenderness, belief, and unwavering presence shaped the earliest contours of his life. “They always noticed me,” he said softly. “They gave me spirit, they told me, ‘You are the fastest, you are the smartest, everything is temporary.’”

His grandmother carried him on her back everywhere, through cold mornings, across village paths, up and down the small steps of the home where he spent most of his childhood watching the world from windows and doorways. Her arms became both his mobility and his faith; her voice, a reminder that life was not defined by the body but by qairat (will), the inner strength that Abai described as the backbone of moral courage.

School came to his home in those early years. Teachers visited, leaving assignments, but it was really his grandmother who sat beside him, teaching him the rhythms of discipline, the tastes of letters, the feeling of discovery. He studied not for grades, not for the future, but for her, for the trust reflected in her eyes. Life was quiet, contemplative. He remembers thinking deeply even as a boy, wondering about people, fate, fairness.

When his grandfather passed away, he felt the foundations of his world tremble, but his grandmother pulled him through grief with soft firmness: “This is temporary. Keep moving forward.”

Everything changed at twelve. He was sent to a sanatorium in Rostov-on-Don, a place where children with conditions like his were gathered from across the Soviet Union. It was the first time he saw others like himself, some with no legs, some with no arms, some blind, many with pain he could recognize immediately.

One boy, born without limbs and without sight, left a mark on Ulan so deep it became the seed of his later transformation. “He had such a strong heart,” Ulan said. “He wanted to live. Through him I learned the meaning of life.” Six months later, the boy died, his heart transplanted to save another child. That moment became Ulan’s earliest calling.

“We all cried,” he remembered. “We said: ‘God, thank you for the life you gave us.’ And after that, I began progressing … forward, forward, forward.”

In Rostov, doctors performed nerve stimulation, laser therapy, massage. Slowly, astonishingly, his body began to wake. One day he stood. Another day he walked. When his mother returned after two years apart, she didn’t recognize him, her son who had left without words now speaking Russian fluently, his speech clear, his eyes bright with awakening. He returned to Qazaqstan no longer only a boy with disabilities, but a boy who had tasted rebirth.

Yet home was still a place of poverty. His father, a plant worker, earned 60–70 rubles and drank much of it. “We lived poor,” Ulan said. “Black bread, no condensed milk. And I thought, why can others have more than me?” Pride stung him, not the arrogance of comparison, but the fire of dignity.

At thirteen, he helped his mother sell fruits and vegetables, standing for her when she was sick, managing the stall when she cooked lunch, and learning the ways of the bazaar. He saved every kopeck, refusing to waste anything. And at thirteen years old, he bought his first one-room apartment.

“I saved,” he said simply. “I didn’t scatter my money.”

Alongside economic struggle was emotional yearning. His school director told him plainly that he wouldn’t manage past ninth grade. “Why not?” he had asked. “I can.” But the director gently insisted that “logic would not develop further.” Those words lit a fire in him, a refusal to accept limits imposed by others.

He asked his grandmother for permission to leave home for Almaty. Though his mother cried, worried for her vulnerable son, Ulan stood firm. “If I stay, I will be nobody,” he told them. “I have to go.”

Arriving in Almaty with a dream of studying Arabic and religion, he faced rejection after rejection. “You cannot stand on your feet,” one mufti told him. “How will your logic work?” But the boy who had risen from paralysis would not step backward again.

With no place to live, he slept in Panfilov Park, hid in the mosque at night, slipping out at dawn before the muftiate arrived. “Two years I wandered,” he said. “Two years without housing.” He survived by weighing tourists on Green Bazaar scales for a few tenge at a time.

Then compassion came unexpectedly. A man who lived alone invited him to stay. Together, they began selling watermelons and melons. Ulan noticed even the “night butterflies,” women working the streets, bought fruit from him. “They too are people,” he said. “Of course they buy.” That was the foundation of his philosophy: everyone deserved dignity.

Determined to study Arabic, he prepared day and night in libraries. At that period the person who supported him died suddenly in front of him. Ulan collapsed emotionally, sleeping for days. His exam performance suffered, and he felt the sting of failure deeply. But he tried again, and again, “by force,” he said, and finally was accepted into an Arabic college.

For the first time, he lived in a dormitory, surrounded by students from across the CIS. “Life continued,” he said. “I kept studying.”

But he also needed money. He began selling small goods — Chinese brushes, bags — at bazaars. Seeing his limited mobility, people helped him. They supported him with purchases, trust, encouragement. It was entrepreneurship in its rawest form, born from necessity, shaped by resilience, fueled by sheer will.

Later, he enrolled at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, studying religious studies and political philosophy. He lived in the dormitory again, this time becoming a producer and organizer for young musicians. He formed a group, arranged gigs, and recorded studio tracks.

“They dug toilets for $50,” he laughed. “And we used that money to record songs.” Soon they were performing on squares and weddings. His entrepreneurial spirit expanded into creativity, community, and leadership.

Then came his greatest calling: building a public association for people with disabilities, a dream rooted in childhood memories of the boy who died in Rostov, and in his own journey of being carried on someone else’s back.

“Healthy artists had concerts,” he said. “But disabled people, no one showed their talents.” His first concert in the early 2000s featured leading Qazaq performers supporting his cause. Today, twenty-five years later, he still organizes concerts where deaf, blind, and wheelchair-using performers shine on stage. “People always say thank you,” he says. “I’m doing this because I have a healthy spirit.”

He also became a history teacher. Fifteen years in the classroom, teaching grades five through nine. “When I teach, I relax,” he said. “Everything I do — concerts, school, business — gives me peace.” His students adore him, especially because he is also a blogger with more than 70,000 followers.

“I show who I am,” he said. “I dress simply, walk on Arbat, hand out sweets. I motivate people.” When he posts, thousands respond, calling him Audan-ata — the affectionate father of the district.

Life was not without setbacks. Diabetes struck him hard; he traveled to Istanbul for surgery that many said would not work. “When I got sick,” he said, “all the people who said ‘dear friend’ disappeared.” Only his wife and children remained. He mortgaged his house, went through surgery, and rose again, just as he had risen after paralysis.

Today he walks, teaches, organizes concerts, mentors youth with disabilities, advises his district’s akim, and continues to grow his public association. In 2023 he won a nomination as Organizer of the Year on Zhuldyz TV. This year he was awarded a medal on Teachers’ Day.

“What am I now?” he asked. “I am an independent person. I didn’t give in to anything. I conquered my illnesses. I conquered life.”

He is a strict but loving father, soft with his daughter, firm with his sons. “I tell them: when I am gone, you must be better than me.” His wife maintains the home atmosphere, sensing his moods, keeping peace with quiet strength. His friends, many with disabilities more severe than his, are his anchor, “scolding me when I get lost,” reminding him of the opportunities he still has.

He dreams not of wealth, but of purpose. “My goals?” he smiled. “Only my family. My children. That they stand firmly on their feet. My own dream? It already came true.”

Looking back, he regrets nothing. “If I tripped anywhere, it wasn’t a call to turn back,” he said. “Only forward.” His life became a testament to Abai’s harmony of aqyl, zhurek, and qairat — mind, heart, and will — lived not as theory but as survival, dignity, and service.

From a boy carried on his grandmother’s back to a man who carries others, his story embodies the Tolyq Adam ideal: a life of conscience, courage, and compassion.

“Success?” he reflected. “It’s not wealth. A successful person is rich inside. Some poor people are happy. Some billionaires are miserable. It depends on the human being.”

And in that simple truth, Ulan revealed the quiet philosophy that shaped his entire journey: that true worth is measured not by what life gives, but by how one transforms it, how one keeps walking even when the world says it’s impossible.

VLADIMIR LVOV’S LABOR, HEALING, AND THE WHOLENESS OF LIFE

In Akkol, a small city in the Akmola region, the hum of bees has been the soundtrack to Vladimir Lvov’s life since childhood. His grandfather Marat Asadulovich turned to beekeeping at forty-five on a brother’s advice, “Start keeping bees and your asthma will pass,” and the boy of twelve who followed him to the hives never really left.

By eighteen Vladimir had his own colonies; this season marks his twenty-first. He speaks of the craft the way some speak of prayer: a practice that orders time, deepens attention, and keeps a family’s narrative alive. His grandfather died this year at the age of 90.

“I am engaged exclusively with bees,” he says simply. “No other work interests me. I am grateful to my grandfather for such a work that I love.”

Love alone did not set his course. The decisive turn came with illness and surgery in 2016, a sudden halt that clarified what was already in his hands.

“I sat and thought, why am I searching when I already have everything? Here it is, the business that I enjoy. I just need to delve deeper.”

What had been weekend beekeeping became a vocation grounded in mind, heart, and will. He expanded the apiary, refined processes, and studied apitherapy, finding in each small improvement a way to heal body and spirit — his own and others’.

His year is written by the seasons. Winter is for preparation, the patient making of five to six hundred frames, sawing, wire-stretching, laying foundation, for a summer that starts at dawn and runs until the long northern twilight.

One day while he was sitting in the yurt, a new idea came to his mind to create api-yourta. It could be the first api-yourta in the country. Many people are interested in coming with their families and staying together.

“I’m a nomad — I travel through the fields and around the districts all summer long. I need a yurt and I bought myself a yurt for my apiary. It’s not just a yurt, it’s an Api-Yurt,” said Vladimir, sharing that he plans to scale the number of Api-yourta in the future.

The apiary is mobile: acacia in Ernazar, clover in Enbek, rapeseed, sunflower — fields called waypoints on a map of nectar. Each hive is a family with a character of its own, he says, “some aggressive, some friendly, some extremely eager for honey… and others lazy, like humans.”

Watching them has made him gentler. “Previously I was more impulsive; now I react more calmly,” he reflects. Somewhere between the work and the listening, the buzzing steadies him.

He built a hut on a cart in his first year and slid two hives under the bed, discovering what old apitherapy texts described as “sleeping on bees”: the felt vibrations, the smell of wax and honey, a low electromagnetic hum that seems to nudge the body back toward balance.

“After working hard all day, I would lie down, and in an hour and a half feel a surge of energy. At first I thought it was imagination. But it works.”

There is the stern patience of craft here, and a scientist’s curiosity. He prefers evidence to folklore, quietly correcting internet myths about tinctures with formulas that have been tested. When customers asked for remedies, he hesitated until he had the proportions right; then an older woman called back, “My father feels rejuvenated,” and Vladimir tried it himself, becoming his own proof.

The apiary is family. His wife worked alongside him before maternity leave; his small children, five and seven, have learned to stand patiently with labels.

“At first I refused because I could do it faster. Now I let them. By the third jar they’re already neat.”

He hopes they will carry the work forward, not out of obligation but because they find their own place in it — creams, ointments, healing candles, the gentle products of care.

Hospitality is part of the ethic: tea is non-negotiable.

“If you visit a beekeeper and don’t have tea, it’s disrespectful.”

He says it with a grin, but he also means it. In the forest, in May, when apple and bird cherry bloom, he urges visitors to remember how life should feel.

The hardest part is time. He is producer, mover, seller — every role at once.

“I have millions of ideas,” he admits, and the to-do list outpaces the daylight. Delegation would require more hives and stable cashflow.

Industry-level beekeeping in Qazaqstan lags, he says: potential is vast, but support systems are thin. Grants exist in principle, yet property collateral puts them out of reach for those with ideas but few assets.

“Programs exist, but not for the poor,” he says plainly.

He once defended a small grant and received 300,000 tenge, but the larger eco-tourism proposal — guest houses, learning, rest — stalled in committee. Transparency would help: “Show us who received the grants and what they did.” Until then, he reinvests slowly and relies on his own.

Crisis forced invention. A season of Varroa mites, bee enemy number one, left only eleven of fifty families alive going into winter. With spring coming, colonies costing 25,000–30,000 tenge each, and no funds to replace forty, he thought laterally and launched “A Bee in Every Home.”

Teachers, doctors, retirees bought a family of bees in spring; he managed all labor and logistics and delivered honey as a dividend by September.

“Essentially, I pre-sold the harvest,” he explains.

People came to the apiary to rest, help with extraction, and watch the work. The initial problem became a new line of business; a house in the apiary followed, where families could stay overnight, and ideas seeded more ideas — kumys with honey from a Stepnogorsk horse farm, pairings with artisans who make cheese or sew traditional costumes, exchanges that tether rural craft to urban appetite.

The apiary is also a classroom. Fairs in Kokshetau, Astana, and Stepnogorsk bring questions, and he answers without hurry: diastase numbers, nectar flow, the difference between industrial and migratory practice, why some honeys crystallize and others don’t.

He doesn’t hard-sell. “If I push, they’ll think it’s a trick and stop using it,” he says. Better that interest ripen on its own; then the learning lands.

He has a brand now, “Lvov Apiary,” and the name travels ahead of him. First you work for the name, a friend told him, then the name works for you.

He knows burnout. It comes in the off-season when pace slackens and apathy creeps in, or when he plans beyond what one person can lift. Rest is the remedy — doing nothing is already something.

In summer he feels limitless; the bees’ order becomes his order, and the forest keeps him in rhythm. This is well-being not as escape but as moral clarity: an unhurried alignment of purpose and practice. He tries to hold onto it in winter by imagining what will blossom and preparing the ground.

On paper he has disability status; in conversation he talks about health, about limits that nudged him to make a clear choice.

“When you do what you love, you don’t count the hours,” he says.

That love becomes an ethic: take responsibility for your craft, tell the truth about your products, keep hospitality alive, teach what you can, and refuse to treat customers as marks.

When public programs disappoint, he doesn’t rail; he plots alternatives, nudged by aqyl (mind). When fatigue presses, he leans on routine and rest, steadied by jurek (heart). When money is thin or pests destroy a season’s work, he refuses to fold, carried by qairat (will). The shape of Abai’s Tolyq Adam is felt rather than declared.

He is not naive about systems. He can list the missed chances — financing that favors those with expensive collateral, committees that praise then decline, secrecy that invites distrust. But he also sees doors that might yet open: international eco-tourism grants, employment subsidies that could help him hire a content maker, platforms where accurate knowledge cuts through folk remedies and fake expertise.

He resists the cynicism that says nothing changes. “Support exists,” he repeats, “but it must be directed to those who truly need it.” In the meantime he moves one hive, one frame, one fair at a time, building something slow and sturdy.

Advice, when asked, sounds like the life he’s chosen.

“First, love what you do,” he says. “If you consciously choose your path, obstacles fade, even if slowly.”

He doesn’t map five-year plans; he holds an image and walks toward it, adjusting as he learns. What matters most is not how much money a decision brings but whether it is useful — “useful to me and to those around me.”

He wants to popularize bee products for national health because he has seen them work, and because even beekeepers, he says, “don’t fully trust their own products.” He wants a stationary apiary with flowering herbs calculated by agronomists so visitors can come any day, and he toys with a grand idea — year-round honey by following blooms across borders, a traveling show of the world’s nectar with a Qazaq heart.

There is a quiet, resilient dignity in the way he keeps returning to first principles. Curiosity — Why does this tincture help? Which plants heal what? — keeps the soul awake. Work — the honest, patient labor of mending frames and tending families — keeps the will from hardening into bitterness. Hospitality — offering tea, time, a bed over humming hives — keeps the heart supple.

Vladimir does not romanticize the forest; he invites people into its reality and lets the reality do the teaching.

“Come find one day,” he says. “Escape the hustle. Remember how life should be lived.”

What began as a family craft became a livelihood, then a public good, then a modest movement that braids eco-tourism, health education, and entrepreneurship. His wife’s hands, his children’s crooked-then-straight labels, the neighbors who bring friends, the teachers who bought bees and received honey, the older woman who ordered twenty bottles because her father felt young again — all these strands tie a life to a community.

The impact is neither flashy nor small. It is exactly the size of a frame in a hive: limited, necessary, and alive with purpose.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Sova’s narrative begins long before he ever thought of leading a large organization for people with disabilities. He grew up in the Soviet Union, in a world where duty to the state, collective responsibility and quiet endurance were woven into everyday life.

As a young man he followed that call of duty all the way to Chernobyl, where he served as a liquidator after the disaster. Those months left an invisible mark on his body, a slow-burning injury that would only fully reveal itself years later.

For a long time he lived as an ordinary Soviet citizen, working in public service, doing what needed to be done. He did not think of himself as “special” in any way. Then in 1990, eight years after Chernobyl, doctors officially assigned him a disability group.

“In 1990, I was officially assigned a disability group as a Chernobyl liquidator,” he recalls calmly.

The diagnosis did not come as a dramatic accident in one moment; it was more like a door quietly closing behind him. One day he was simply a civil servant; the next he was, in the state’s language, an invalid.

He did what many people did in those years: he went to the new society for people with disabilities that had just appeared in Kostanay. A small group of activists had formed it in 1988, pushing through the bureaucracy of social protection departments and the akimat to create a place where people with disabilities could at least register their existence.

“At first there were 20, 30, maybe 50 people,” he remembers. “Now there are about one and a half thousand.”

He joined quietly, still working in the government, just watching how this fragile association tried to find its place in the late Soviet and then early independent Qazaqstan.

The 1990s were harsh. Pensions and benefits were delayed; people queued not just for food but for survival. Vladimir saw how a simple food package, a bit of pasta, some rice, could bring grown men and women to tears.

“You should have seen their faces,” he says. “They thanked us with tears in their eyes just for a couple of kilos of pasta.”

It was then that something shifted inside him. The work of this small association was no longer abstract charity; it became proof that his own suffering after Chernobyl could be turned into something that mattered to others.

In 1998 the organization’s leaders invited him to join the board. By then it had a modest “material base” of its own — some rooms, basic equipment, a fragile network of trust. When the chairman passed away in 1999, Vladimir stepped in as deputy chairman. Eleven years later, in 2011, he was elected chairman of the Kostanay City Voluntary Society of People with Disabilities. What began as a way to register for benefits had become his life’s work.

By that time he carried his disability like he carried his medals, seriously, but without drama.

“I’m a second-group disabled person,” he says, “but I don’t feel like a ‘person with limited abilities’.”

He dislikes the convoluted new terminology. The phrase “persons with disabilities” sounds to him like something artificial, almost hiding the human being behind legal language.

“I prefer the simple word ‘disabled’,” he says. “Above all, we are people.”

It is a small linguistic choice, but it reveals his stubborn insistence on honesty and dignity over euphemism — mind, heart and will working together.

Under his leadership, the society grew into a complex, almost entrepreneurial organization with 56 employees and around 1,500 members, including 242 children with disabilities. It offers three key social services: taxi transport for people with disabilities, home care for older and citizens with disabilities, and rehabilitation for adults with mental disorders, run from their own leisure centre.

Around these core services, they have built an entire ecosystem of cultural and social life: sports events, creative clubs, trips in summer for wheelchair users to the central square to sit in the sun and breathe fresh air, visits to theatres and concerts, meetings with artists.

“We try to make sure each person feels attention and support and can live an active life,” he explains.

If this sounds like the work of a small municipality rather than an NGO, that is precisely the point. Vladimir describes the society almost like an enterprise: it has a building, a leisure centre, utility facilities that “support the activities of the society.” It runs on contracts, social orders, and an intricate web of cooperation with local authorities.

He knows the mechanics of the state from the inside, having served two terms as a deputy, and uses that knowledge to navigate the bureaucracy.

“I can easily get an appointment with the city akim or his deputies,” he says matter-of-factly. “Thanks to this, many issues are resolved quickly.”

Yet his work is not just administrative. It is emotional labour of the deepest kind. Every day he and his team meet people whose lives have been broken by illness, accident, or war, and who are trying to rebuild some sense of worth. He listens to their stories, their grievances, their fatigue, their hope.

“You need to take it all through yourself,” he admits. “Otherwise you won’t hear the person. And if you don’t hear, you won’t be able to help. So you must understand, listen, and even if you cannot help with action, at least support with words.”

This openness to others’ suffering comes at a cost. He speaks of evenings when he goes home with a heavy heart after a day of difficult conversations. His wife sees when he comes back quiet, carrying someone else’s pain on his shoulders. Those are the moments when his own resilience is tested, not in the dramatic heroism of Chernobyl, but in the slow, daily endurance of emotional weight.

“Sometimes, honestly, it is hard on the soul,” he says softly.

How does he recover? Paradoxically, by returning to the collective. He jokes that he doesn’t know how to rest; even in the sanatorium he lasted only three days before he and a colleague looked at each other and decided to go back to work.

Long weekends see him at the office inspecting pipes, heating, security, making sure the machine keeps running. Yet the same workplace that exhausts him also revives him.

“I come to work, meet the team, there are smiles, jokes,” he says. “You get distracted from the problems. Most often, it is the team that helps cope with this.”

He relies deeply on that team. Part of his moral code as a leader is that not everyone is cut out for this work. He remembers a driver who, after two days of transporting passengers with disabilities and hearing their stories, came to him and said, “I probably can’t work here. It’s too hard to take in.”

Vladimir did not judge him; he simply understood that this was not his path. Those who stay are the ones who can both empathize and remain steady, who combine tenderness with internal strength, an everyday embodiment of Abai’s union of mind, heart and will.

As a leader with disabilities in a post-Soviet context, Vladimir has watched the landscape shift around him. He remembers the 1990s and early 2000s when the general attitude to people with disabilities was “as long as they don’t interfere.”

Today, he sees a different picture: wheelchair users placed up front during city celebrations, special platforms in theatres, ramps and wide doorways in new buildings. He speaks with real respect about Qazaqstan signing the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and adopting the Social Code.

“This is one of the most significant steps,” he says. “It changed the attitude of the state and society.”

At the same time, he is clear-eyed about bureaucratic failures. He describes the new licensing requirements for home care and rehabilitation services as a chaotic, half-built system that has created months of uncertainty for organizations like his. He worries about constant changes in rules that “don’t have a clear mechanism” and make it difficult to plan.

Still, his instinct is to solve problems through relationship and persistence, not public outrage. He works closely with regional social protection departments and labour offices, pushing for clarity while keeping services running. This is his way of resisting the old deficit-oriented mindset: not shouting about disability, but quietly building structures that work.

Vladimir sees people with disabilities not as passive recipients of care, but as agents who must move themselves if they want change. He loves the proverb “water does not flow under a lying stone” and repeats it when he talks about entrepreneurship.

He admires a wheelchair-using couple where the wife is a deputy and the husband a director of an NGO, both leading active, public lives.

“I hold them up as an example even for myself,” he says. “They not only live fully, they help others live.”

When asked what advice he would give to people with disabilities wanting to start a business, he answers simply: use the opportunities that exist, be persistent, don’t stop at the first failure. He knows that many people, after becoming disabled, withdraw into themselves, especially those with mobility impairments. After several attempts that don’t work, they give up.

“But there are others — persistent, tenacious,” he says. “They try ten times, and on the eleventh they succeed.”

For him, that stubbornness is the heart of success, more than any grant or program.

His own idea of success is not about money or status.

“Success is when you have authority among your colleagues,” he says. “When people say, ‘That’s our chairman.’”

It is a definition grounded in moral recognition, not in cars or titles. In that sense he is very close to Abai’s proud man who avoids humiliation and values conscience over fame. Vladimir does not want to be celebrated as a hero; he wants to be known as someone who did his job well and did not betray the people who trusted him.

After more than two decades at the organization, he reflects on his life without bitterness. Yes, he would sometimes have liked to be more lenient here, stricter there — “living life is not like crossing a river,” he smiles. But overall, he says, “I think I have lived most of my life not in vain.”

He believes he has contributed something meaningful to his family and to the thousands of people with disabilities in Kostanay whose daily lives are a little easier because the taxi arrived on time, the home-care worker came, the summer outing was organized, or simply because someone answered the phone and listened.

His motto, as he puts it, is simple: “Never give up in anything. Always move forward.”

It is not the loud optimism of a motivational poster, but a quiet, seasoned conviction born from standing in radiation-polluted soil, from watching people cry over a bag of rice in the 1990s, from sitting across the table from a mother who doesn’t know how she will manage another winter.

His entrepreneurship is not measured in profit, but in social infrastructure, in trust, in collective resilience.

In Vladimir Vladimirovich’s narrative, disability is neither erased nor romanticized. It is a fact of his body and of his social status, shaping his path from state service to civic leadership.

Yet through his work, he pushes against the old post-Soviet image of people with disabilities as passive and pitiful. Instead, he offers another figure: the experienced chairman who knows every corridor of the akimat, who refuses to let people be forgotten, who still believes in collectivism and kindness despite the noise of online negativity.

In him, the calm logic of the administrator, the compassion of the listener, and the stubborn strength of the Chernobyl liquidator come together. It is a quiet, everyday Tolyq Adam, built not in theory but in countless small acts of care that ripple through Kostanay and beyond.

He grew up in the South, in Shymkent, where neighbors still greet each other at gates and the line between kin and community is thin. Erkebulan Rustemov remembers that the elders valued modesty, the gentle habit of treating people as people, regardless of status. “Humanity should come first,” he says now, echoing a lesson he learned long before he could name it. He carried that quiet code into adulthood without fanfare, studying, working, living fast the way young men do, not yet imagining that one day he would have to relearn everything from sitting to eating. In 2020, when the world paused for a pandemic, his life stopped altogether.

An injury left him in critical condition, six months in intensive care, and after that, practically bedbound. Rehabilitation centers turned him away; none were ready to accommodate him. “For three years,” he says, “I was at home.”

What a person does in that kind of stillness reveals who they are becoming. The first revelation was pragmatic: you cannot survive on benefits. He began searching for ways to earn with a phone, a mind, and whatever strength he could gather. Online courses had just begun to bloom across Qazaqstan; he enrolled in Arman Yusupov’s “Potok” (flow) programme and spent six months learning and, crucially, practicing, managing social media, keeping a blogger’s profile alive, turning attention into value. A classmate let him cut his teeth on an early e-commerce project; the work went well, and the second revelation followed: when you do good work, word travels on its own legs. He did not yet call it entrepreneurship, but the qairat (will), the will to move, was already underway.

The turning point came like a pair of thunderclaps. First, his body was still adapting; the vestibular system wouldn’t cooperate, and rehab was fragile. Then his father was diagnosed with late-stage cancer. “It was just my mother and me,” he says. They were renting a small place in Astana without many relatives nearby. The question — how will we live? — carried both money and meaning. “I started taking different courses, acting in videos as a model, doing everything I could.” He worked on his personal brand not as vanity but as survival, first doing things for social reasons, later learning to monetize his time because time is health and health is life. “There’s nothing personal, just business,” he says with a wry smile, meaning that dignity requires fair exchange: I work, you pay. You don’t owe me, and I don’t owe you.

A practical miracle arrived in 2022 when he bought a German Otto Bock wheelchair, 1,800,000 tenge, a fortune, and the company offered him an internship in return. First he worked remotely, then came in twice a week, and after a threemonth probation, full time. “They have a Western attitude,” he says with gratitude. “It doesn’t matter how many hours I sit in the office, the result matters. I can complete a monthly plan in a week and rest the rest of the time.” That simple, outcome-based respect for aqyl (mind) and qairat (will) became a lifeline. In parallel, he declined full-time social-security placements that paid 80–100k tenge for a whole day’s presence; the hours-for-pennies logic held no future. He wanted a results economy, not a chair economy.

Alongside paid work, he opened another channel of service and self-respect: his Instagram blog. He posted, very plainly, the information he wished someone had handed him, how to apply for disability status without endless circles, how to get discounted train and air tickets, how to access theaters and cinemas for free. He wrote about etiquette, too: “Our society doesn’t yet know how to interact with people with disabilities,” he says. Some push a wheelchair without asking; others hover and avoid eye contact. He began giving talks and running seminars. The message was not condemnation; it was education rooted in dignity. “We’re the same people, and our heads are working. We don’t bite in the street.We’re not contagious.” When spring softened the city, he helped launch forums in malls, asserting on presence as pedagogy. The barriers themselves are often banal and therefore exhausting.

He has learned to ask for help. “Even healthy people do,” he says, trying to dismantle the shame that clings to assistance in post-Soviet culture. The deeper barrier sits inside minds trained to see disability as deficit. Some people with acquired injuries hide; others cannot yet accept the change. He has seen despair hover like a shadow, “there have been cases when people wanted to commit suicide,” he says quietly. So he uses his voice without theatrics. His advice is straightforward: don’t be afraid of people’s opinions, because people will always talk; fear only living in fear. Try an idea, test it, and if it fails, move; qozgalys bul omir. (movement is life).

Work brought structure, but resilience required a different architecture, one that wove heart and mind with a discipline of spirit. Music steadies him. He is self-taught on the piano, the grandson of a composer, and he keeps melodies running, during content planning, during emails, even between meetings. Books helped, too; he clung to lines from Joe Dispenza, Your Own Placebo, The Subconscious Can Do Anything, copying passages by hand, practicing the mental drills they proposed. And there is prayer. “The Qur’an helps,” he says simply. On heavy nights he reads suras before sleep. He is not a fanatic. He is grateful. Gratitude is its own practice of wholeness.

That wholeness shows up in work habits as well. He has learned to delegate, building a small team of hungry, talented teenagers, mobile photographers, copywriters, bright 16-to 20-year-olds who know the pulse of platforms. He takes the strategy himself, sits with clients to clarify average checks and monthly goals, writes content plans, and then hands tasks to his team. The feedback loop keeps his heart awake: audio messages from customers who can suddenly move freely because a prosthesis fits, a video from a client whose properly chosen wheelchair restored the rhythm of errands. “That’s the best thrill,” he says. Online followers leave comments that tug him through long days. Sometimes he burns out anyway. “We are a generation that hasn’t learned to rest,” he admits. When he catches himself fraying, he drives to Borovoe, listens to the wind, and comes back.

The aqyl-jurek-qairat (mind-heart-will) balance also reshaped his sense of mission. In the beginning, he wanted to cover rent and groceries. Three years later, his horizon has widened: he wants to build a rehabilitation center that treats the body and the mind together. “Physical recovery is hard,” he says, “but mental recovery is harder. You can build muscle; if your mind doesn’t heal, you can’t live fully.” The center he imagines will help families, too - parents and spouses who carry invisible burdens. “When one person becomes disabled, the whole family suffers,” he doesn’t say it as a complaint. He says it is like a design requirement.

If there is a philosophy in all of this, it is spare and Qazaq and very Abai. He believes in learning, in steady work, in treating people with respect, in not confusing office hours with results. He believes that status tempts people to forget who they grew up with, and he refuses that amnesia. “Don’t forget your people,” he says. He’s seen how sudden wealth or public praise can lift a person out of their circle and into loneliness. He declines that path, not as moral performance, but as a habit of jurek (heart): humanity first, always. He teaches his friends in the Para-sport community to value their time and reputation: interviews and filming are work; monetize them. Dignity is not charity; it is fair exchange

There are still days when the old world shows its teeth. A grand building without an accessible entrance. A meeting where the only open path is asking strangers for a lift. A public contract that values presence over contribution. On those days, he leans on a sentence that is both shield and invitation to proportion: “If a problem can be solved with money, it’s not a problem; if it can’t be solved, it’s experience.” The line lets him keep moving. It also keeps him generous with himself, forgiving the body’s limits without resenting the work of adaptation. “I haven’t learned to rest yet,” he admits with a laugh. “I will try.”

In a post-Soviet city still learning new etiquette, he has become a modest architect of culture change. He explains how to talk to a wheelchair user: ask first, never push without consent. He models what genuine inclusion looks like: give a person a job, not a pitying glance. He insists that fear and shame are bad teachers. In his words you can hear Abai’s insistence that the Tolyq Adam grows where intellect, compassion, and will are held together by everyday deeds. He isn’t preaching a framework; he is living it. He studies, delegates, prays, plays piano, answers DMs, speaks at forums, trains with the Paralympic team, rolls into rooms that don’t yet expect him, and, day after different day, chooses movement.

His impact spreads in rings: a client who can cross a street without pain; a teenager on his team who discovers she is good at copy and better at courage; a follower who learns how to claim a travel discount and then takes her mother to the sea; a family that sees their son’s new routine as possibility rather than punishment. He will tell you that he’s only beginning to understand why this trial was given to him. He will also tell you, with that same plainness from Shymkent, that gratitude is not a feeling but a practice: you keep showing up, and the meaning shows up, too.

“Don’t be afraid,” he says when asked for advice. “People will always talk. Fear only living your life in fear.”

Try, test, change. Ask for help. Keep learning. In that sequence you can feel a life bending toward wholeness. Erkebulan’s narrative is not the heroic arc of a man who conquered his body. It is the quieter, more demanding work of a man who integrates aqyl (mind), jurek (heart) and qairat (will) until the person you meet is not an injury, not a social unit, not a case, just a human being, building a future that includes everyone he can reach. Movement is life, and he is moving

His entrepreneurial path also mirrors Abai’s teaching. Yerlan learned to analyse, reason, compare, try, fail, adjust, a living example of the “attractive force of the like,” constantly testing ideas until they matched reality. Even when denied grants, refused bank loans, or overwhelmed by financial mistakes, he never blamed fate. Instead, he studied, asked questions, refined his skills, and continued to grow. He understood, in Abai’s words, that spiritual and practical knowledge must be cultivated with vigilance or they wither.

Above all, his heart remained clear. He did not allow frustration, bitterness, or conceit to cloud the “mirror of the soul.” His center was created not for personal gain but to help those who had nowhere else to go — a reflection of the sensibility of the heart that Abai sees as essential to true humanity. Yerlan’s life unites mind, heart and will exactly as Abai envisions, showing how reason and willpower can elevate a person beyond hardship, restoring dignity and purpose through steady, honest work.

Yerlan Adilbekov was born in the quiet town of Charsk, in East Qazaqstan, where the rhythm of life followed the movement of trains and seasons. His childhood was simple, close to the land, surrounded by people who worked with their hands and believed in quiet strength. After finishing school, he carried with him not dreams of university, but a locomotive engineering certificate, an old Soviet-era system that prepared young boys for work instead of higher study. At nineteen, he was already on the railway, an assistant driver responsible for the long, heavy freight trains that crossed the Qazaq steppe. “We mostly carried cargo,” he recalled. “Passenger trains only from time to time.” He was young, strong, and full of the confidence that comes from knowing exactly what your hands can do.

Life changed the day after he turned twenty-one. It was summer, the kind of heat that makes rivers look inviting. He ran, took three quick steps, and dove headfirst into the water. “I misjudged it,” he said simply. The place he leapt into was shallow, although just a little further the river ran deep. The mistake was only a matter of seconds, but it fractured his cervical spine and damaged ninety percent of his spinal cord. Everything that had defined him, movement, work, strength, disappeared in an instant.

For six years after the injury, Yerlan remained confined to his home. He couldn’t sit, couldn’t travel, couldn’t do anything beyond the walls of his room. Yet even in this stillness, something inside him refused to give up. He began creating his own training equipment from what he had: ropes, rails, pulleys attached to his bed. “I made my bed into a real exercise machine,” he said. Every day, seven days a week, he trained, pulling, stretching, trying again and again. Slowly, the body that had betrayed him began responding. He learned to sit. He learned to dress himself. Independence, once taken for granted, became a victory of sheer, stubborn will.

When he was finally strong enough to sit, a woman from a local organization visited his home as part of a disability support program. Yerlan asked her, almost shyly, “Could you help me get into some kind of university?” She told him she would try. Two months later, she kept her promise. She found a distance-learning program at the Qazaq University of Technology and Business in Astana. Classes took place via Skype, a novelty at the time. Yerlan joined a group of seven to eleven students studying programming from their homes. It was the first time since his injury that his mind had space to grow again.

When he reached his final year, Yerlan decided to move to Astana. “To conquer the capital,” he said with a smile. He looked for work but found none at first. Then came an interview at JSC “NIT” an early e-government service company. They hired him as an E-GOV consultant, helping people obtain electronic digital signatures. The company prepared the office so he could work comfortably, removing unnecessary partitions and adjusting his workstation. It was meaningful work, helping others navigate systems that were new to everyone. For almost three years he was part of something bigger than himself, part of a country learning to move from paper to digital life.

But surgeries interrupted everything, ten of them over two years. “After the surgeries, I wasn’t allowed to sit long,” he recalled. He had to resign. Once again, he found himself pushed back into a space of stillness. But this time, he had knowledge. He had experience. He had will.

He registered as an individual entrepreneur and began participating in government tenders. He taught himself how to navigate tender platforms by reading, researching, and asking questions. “Gradually, I mastered it,” he said. The income was modest but enough to give him confidence. He earned independently. He paid his own way. He reclaimed dignity. Around that time, he tried to attend a new rehabilitation center in Astana, but they accepted only “early stage” patients. When he was denied, something shifted inside him. He remembered seeing stroke patients in hospitals and thinking that with the right system and consistent exercises, their bodies could be restored. “If done regularly for at least a month, a person can recover,” he often thought. He knew this because he had lived it in his own body. That was the moment the seed of an idea was planted:

If others were excluded from rehabilitation, why couldn’t he open a center for people like himself? For years, he nurtured the idea, writing notes in his phone whenever inspiration struck, what rooms were needed, what equipment, how the environment should feel. The notes accumulated until they resembled a complete business plan. He applied for grants, wrote letters to institutions, even to the president’s office. The answers were always the same: “Well done, keep working.” No money. No support

Eventually, Yerlan decided he could not wait for permission. He found a building, negotiated rent, and announced the opening on WhatsApp and through group messages. Within five minutes, his phone began ringing continuously. “I answered calls for three hours straight,” he said. Eight people made advance payments. With that money, he and his team bought beds, exercise machines, mattresses, everything needed for the first patients. Even the landlord supported him, giving him a month and a half grace period. It was a miracle made from willpower.

But the building had no accessible entrance, and all the rooms were on the second floor. He was dropped once while being carried up the stairs. “It became clear it couldn’t continue,” he said quietly. He closed the center and fell ill from exhaustion. For nearly a year, he worked on recovering his health and strength. On June 8 the following year, he opened a second center, this time slowly, room by room, with the money from each new patient. He lived in one of the empty rooms and turned another into an exercise hall. Gradually, the center grew to fourteen rooms, with physiotherapy instructors, massage therapists, a doctor, nurses on three shifts, orderlies, and cooks. For six years it has continued operating, taking in about twenty people at a time, with plans to expand to forty.

The uniqueness of Yerlan’s center lies in its structure. For many wheelchair users, daily travel to rehabilitation is nearly impossible. “People who haven’t experienced it simply don’t understand,” he explained. Helping someone transfer to a wheelchair, loading the wheelchair into a car, carrying it back out, it can take enormous physical effort, often too much for families without strong men. Yerlan’s center removes this burden entirely. Patients come once, stay in comfortable accommodation, receive meals, assistance, 24/7 care, and consistent therapy. It is full rehabilitation, not fragmented appointments.

His life as a business owner has not been smooth. Financial literacy was a major challenge. “It turns out finances are not as simple as it seems,” he admitted. He had to learn discipline, separating personal money from business money, enduring cash gaps, facing angry clients when refund delays happened. He survived landlords threatening to cut water and close the center. He learned to increase advertising, manage cash flow, and adjust prices to keep the center alive.

But there is also joy. Yerlan says the best part of entrepreneurship is the beginning, “from scratch, creating something new.” He loves the process of imagining, building, negotiating, organizing. Once the system runs, he becomes less interested. He is a man of movement, even if his body cannot move. His emotional world is shaped by the resilience he developed over years. He experienced burnout, “a state where you want everything to progress but it seems to stand still.” To heal, he closed the center for months, rested, watched TV, visited the village, breathed fresh air. When he felt ready, ideas returned, bringing his heart back to life.

He also speaks often of friendship. His childhood friends never left him. “Not a single day passed without someone coming,” he said. They laughed with him, kept him company, sat by his side in the early years after the injury. Their presence protected him from loneliness. “It’s priceless,” he said simply

He faced infrastructural and systemic barriers, a lack of accessibility, banks refusing loans to first-group disabled people, grant systems that favored other types of projects, no tax benefits for entrepreneurs with disabilities. But he rarely complained. He adapted, found alternatives, and continued. Music also remains a part of his inner world. “I used to play guitar,” he said with a nostalgic smile. Music lifts his spirit, fuels his imagination, and reminds him of who he once was and who he still is.

Yerlan’s philosophy is shaped by experience: “No step back,” he says. Not bravado, but a quiet, steady commitment to action. He often advises younger people with disabilities: “Don’t be afraid to start. Don’t stay at home thinking about what people will say.” Many who come to his center leave more confident, ready to work, study, or start their own businesses. His long-term dream is to open rehabilitation centers across Qazaqstan— in Almaty, East Qazaqstan, and other regions—so people can be closer to home, closer to dignity. He also wants to teach entrepreneurship, to pass on the lessons he learned through mistakes.

When asked about his mission, he pauses. “I haven’t fully formulated it,” he says, “but I feel my goal is to help people with disabilities… so they don’t suffer.” His words echo Abai’s belief that true humanity is found in serving others without selfinterest. Yerlan’s life reflects the balance of mind, heart and will, not as theory, but through lived struggle. He transformed disability into purpose, isolation into service, and personal hardship into a social good. In helping others stand, he stands tall himself.

He was nineteen when life split into a before and an after. A summer accident in 2019 left Yerzhan Seytkazy with a spinal injury; within months, his father passed away. Grief arrived with bills and responsibilities. “I had no choice,” he says. “After the injury, only my mother and I were left, and we had debts. I needed money for rehabilitation.” The loss might have numbed him; instead, it clarified him.

Raised in Almaty, he had finished college as a translator and briefly enrolled at university, trying tourism while already working as a hotel administrator. Practical experience seemed to matter more than coursework, but the accident halted everything just as he was questioning his path. Only recently, “toward the end of 2024,” he notes, did he discover what he truly wants to study: business management. First, though, he had to steady the family and himself.

The injury became a hard teacher in a society where disability is often read as deficit. “Many able-bodied people didn’t initially perceive me as a fully capable, serious person,” he recalls. Pity arrived before respect. He answered by insisting on his own agency. When colleagues assumed winter travel for supplies was impossible, he refused to shrink: “People thought I couldn’t travel in winter to pick up supplies. I said, ‘If it needs doing, I’ll go.’” That quiet posture, neither loud defiance nor passive acceptance, began to shape everything that followed.

To pay for rehabilitation and keep his mind engaged, he started with whatever would earn: “I tried all sorts of things… women’s clothing, household goods.” Trading turned into momentum. Within two years he launched a small marketing agency; in 2022 he moved to Astana and became a team leader at an officially registered rehabilitation center. He manages operations, “everything except finances,” from patient intake and room assignments to staffing, logistics, and funding applications. Clients arrive from across Qazaqstan and the wider CIS for spinal cord injury, stroke, CP, and neurorehabilitation. His mornings are sacred: “I wake up at six in the morning… until noon I work at home without distractions, then head to the center.” On heavy days the inbox swells, “on average per day, we receive 15–50 messages, sometimes 100–150,” and
he sits with each one: “I talk to each person, consult, register, accompany.”

He laughs at the paradox of his temperament, drawn to communication and tired by it in the same breath, but the ethic underneath never wavers. “I treat every message as a call for help.” People write to a person who understands

Barriers persist, named without bitterness. Assignments are quietly downgraded, travel presumed impossible: “No need, better stay put, you’ll get tired.” He responds by being visible, competent, mobile, present. He even tested his independence against his own doubts: “I flew to New York alone…to prove something to myself. And this summer I traveled to London and Ireland.” Trust followed action; responsibility followed trust. The harder obstacles are concrete. “In Astana it’s better, especially on the left bank. But in Almaty you can’t get from point A to point B in a wheelchair.” Ramps and railings miss standards, tiles slip, slopes break momentum; in Pavlodar and Aktobe, “even worse.” He uses taxis; many cannot, transferring from chair to car requires strength and at least two helpers. Bureaucracy adds its own frictions. Reregistering of the LLP stalled because the new address belonged to the founder’s apartment. “I have to keep going back.”

Some inequities cut deeper because they pretend to be math. To secure annual rehabilitation quotas for patients, he pursued a medical license, furniture, certified equipment, inspections, “enormous effort” for a single paper. The insurance tariff stunned him: 9,600 tenge per person per day, the same as brief venereology procedures. “After trauma, rehab is an essential part of life.” Two hours of complex, hands-on therapy cannot be priced like a ten-minute injection. He has begun raising the issue through party channels: “Minimally, it’s unfair.”

Ambition without order burns out; he learned that the hard way. “There was some chaos.” In 2023 he rebuilt his days, mornings for deep work, afternoons on site, evenings for rest and medical care. Psychotherapy became a standing commitment: “I’ve been in psychotherapy for three years, twice a week. Entering the room, I deal with stress, grievances, boundary violations.” Medical treatments, once postponed, are now scheduled “like any business meeting.” The re-patterned week delivered what motivation slogans never do: calm. “I’ve become more organized, disciplined, and productive.” His equanimity is not new; it is cultivated. “I’ve always been calm…childhood, school, teaching English. Whatever happens around me, the most important thing is that I’m fine and well-fed… If I’m okay, we’ll figure out the rest.” It reads flippant; it isn’t. It’s a stance: keep the inner core steady so the outer work can proceed.

Independence did not calcify into pride. Twice he had to initiate fundraising for his own rehab. “It helped me work on my pride… When you must ask for help, stepping over pride, everything inside changes, and you start loving and thanking people.” He prefers reciprocity over transaction: “I can provide free consultations. Today I help you; tomorrow you help me. If you don’t, someone else will.” Mutual aid without a ledger becomes the culture of his work.

If he had one lesson for wouldbe founders, it would be simple. “Communication is the most important tool in life. Money, relationships, opportunities … all come through communication.” Begin with services that need minimal capital, home staffing, visa support, digital marketing. Starting is the hardest part. “Once you start, it’s no longer scary.”

Today he manages the center independently with a financial director while the founder lives abroad. He coordinates Qazaqstan’s branch of the international community for social entrepreneurs, partners with the Association for Inclusive Environments, and lectures on Ethics in communicating with people with disabilities. He helps run a news portal for social enterprise and is developing experience-exchange programs in Istanbul and London so local founders can “see how they work there and apply something here.” His ambitions are precise: grow the agency commercially without branding it a social enterprise; open a second rehabilitation branch abroad by 2026; gather more readers because “results always inspire.” Politically, he advocates for accessible infrastructure nationwide and free university education for people with disabilities, recognizing the hidden costs, medications, catheters, diapers, flights for rehab, that make tuition an impossible extra. “People with disabilities should live independently without accompanying persons.”

He doesn’t preach philosophy; he enacts it. He keeps his aqyl (mind) clear — operations tight, problems scoped, days structured. He keeps his jurek (heart) open — “I treat every message as a call for help,” free consultations, a bias toward listening: “We always want to be heard…

While you’re talking, you realize where your problem lies.” And he keeps his qairat (will) steady — winter errands in a wheelchair, a solo flight to New York, London and Ireland the relentless choosing of action over self-pity. In a culture where sorrow can harden into cynicism and success can slide into self-interest, he chooses a different arc: sorrow acknowledged, will awakened, work aligned with conscience. He refuses preferential treatment yet asks for fairness; he insists on standards without contempt. He is not waiting for a perfect system to act; he is acting to make the system better.

From Yerzhan we learn that dignity is built, daily. Not once, not in spectacle, but in repeated choices: answer the 6 a.m. messages; restructure the week; go where people say you cannot; ask for help when you must; let go when it’s time. Communication can be capital, order can be compassion’s ally, and service is the surest antidote to bitterness. Most of all, wholeness is not the absence of limitation but the integration of mind, heart, and will, a moral harmony that turns private sorrow into public good. He is building that harmony in the open, so others can follow the sound.

Zhansaya Namaz’s life is a heart-first act of leadership. She does not pursue dominance, power, or the spotlight. Instead, she brings joy, dignity, and visibility to people who are too often ignored. She stands up,kindly but firmly, when shop employees dismiss a person with disabilities, when sponsors refuse, when officials overlook inclusion. Every forum she creates, every psychology game she runs, and every social event she organizes says: “We deserve to be seen, valued, and included.” Her courage is not loud, but unwavering. She keeps going even when transportation barriers trap her at home, even when her parents fear for her, even when the city is not built for bodies like hers.

Abai writes that the one who follows the commands of the heart, mercy, generosity, truth, is the true batyr. Zhansaya’s activism is exactly that. She demonstrates jurek (heart) that is brave enough to reject shame culture (Uyat ) and instead speak openly about rights, dignity, and dreams, not only for herself, but for a whole community.

Her work embodies the kind of humanity Abai urged the Qazaq people to embrace: compassion with courage, love with leadership.

From the outside, Shymkent looks like any other fast-growing Qazaq city: wide avenues, new malls, bright billboards. But for Zhansaya Namaz , the city has always been mapped a little differently. Every outing requires planning. Which ramp actually works? Will the “Invalid” (person with disabilities) Taxi come on time? Will there be someone to walk beside her? and yet, this same city has become the stage where she is slowly reshaping what “special” means.

Zhansaya is 28. She introduces herself simply: she lives in Shymkent, works in social projects, charity, and social entrepreneurship. Behind that modest sentence is a life defined by both constraint and quiet rebellion. From childhood she has lived with a condition that affects her coordination and mobility; she needs an accompanying person to attend most events and often depends on her younger brother or parents to move around the city. “I’m an intelligent person,” she says softly, “I just have a problem with coordination.” That distinction matters deeply to her. It is the line she draws again and again, between the body’s limits and the mind’s and heart’s vastness.

Her parents, like many in their generation, responded to disability with fear and overprotection. When she first spoke about wanting to run projects, they told her, “You won’t manage, why do you need that?” Their fear was love, but it wrapped her in cotton wool. As a girl she heard the phrase that still haunts many young Qazaqs: “Uyat bolady – “It will be shameful.” Shame for speaking too loudly, for wanting too much, for stepping out of line when your body already marks you as different. Those words, she says,

Yet even as a teenager, she felt another voice inside her, quieter but firmer. She sensed that Allah had not created her just to sit at home and accept other people’s fears as destiny.

That conviction, half faith and half stubbornness, was the beginning of her entrepreneurial path. After finishing school, she studied accounting by correspondence. It was a practical choice, a profession her family could accept. But the work that really drew her in was not in ledgers and numbers; it was in people. She opened a small social media account on Instagram where parents of special children began to message her, asking about their children’s future. What would happen to them when their parents grew old? How would they study, work, love, live? Their questions echoed her own unspoken fears, and something in her shifted. At first she simply imagined holding a single event for these children, a day of joy where they could forget hospitals and diagnoses. But the response was overwhelming. “Everyone started asking us to continue,” she recalls, “not just for children, but for everyone.”

That was the seed of her first social project.

At twenty-seven, together with a classmate, also a person with first-group disability who walks with crutches, she launched a forum for parents of special children. They invited well-known speakers and producers like Bakhytzhan Pozilov and Edil Akhmetov, people with real authority and charisma. The goal was simple but radical: to show that children with disabilities and their families deserved the same access to knowledge, inspiration, and high-profile events as anyone else.

The forum was a success. There were many orphans among the participants, many anxious parents, and many tears. The energy in the room convinced her and her co-founder that this could not remain a one-off event. They decided to continue, gradually shifting their attention not only to children but also to adults with disabilities, teenagers, young people, parents, siblings.

Her biggest project so far was a summer social forum. About a hundred people came, including participants from other cities. The program brought together highly qualified professionals, authors, coaches, experts, who shared practical life hacks and knowledge. Gifts and books were distributed. “So that disabled people could develop and keep up with society,” she explains. What gave her the greatest joy was not the number of people or the famous names, but the look in the eyes of parents and children:

That joy, that exchange of energy, is where Abai’s Tolyq Adam quietly appears in her life. Her aqyl (mind) is always learning, she attends forums, psychological trainings, AI camps, basic psychology courses. Her jurek (heart) is wide open to the pain and hopes of special families. And her qairat (will) shows in the way she keeps moving forward despite refusals, logistical nightmares, and the constant need for accompaniment. The harmony is not perfect, she still struggles, still doubts, but the three are slowly learning to walk together.

The systemic barriers she faces are many and familiar. In Shymkent, InvaTaxi 9services are “very underdeveloped,” with too few cars and long waiting times.

Ramps and elevators are often missing or unusable. Public spaces are not built with wheelchairs or crutches in mind. Then there is the attitude: the way shop assistants ignore a girl with a disability who asks the price of something, as if she cannot possibly be a real customer. “It really irritates me,” Zhansaya admits. She tries to intervene gently but firmly:

On top of physical and social barriers come the structural ones around funding. Sponsors often refuse to take her seriously. To organize a new course or forum, she has to write to entrepreneurs again and again, explaining, persuading, proving that people with disabilities are worth investing in. The most painful moments are when someone who had previously agreed suddenly backs out.

But even then, she refused to give up. “Thank God,” she says, “I found a very good person, an acquaintance, who supports me in everything. He helped me organize the New Year for special people.”

From the state, she has received almost no direct support. “To be honest, no government resources have helped us,” she says. Officials tell her to write to private entrepreneurs; her feelings and complaints are not taken seriously. “We are intelligent people, just with the problem of coordination,” she insists. “We understand everything, but so far the government hasn’t provided us with any assistance.” In a postSoviet mindset where disability is still often seen as deficit or charity case rather than as potential, she is pushing for a different logic, one of inclusion, partnership, and respect

Her own family’s journey mirrors this shift. At first her parents opposed her projects, afraid to let their special daughter move independently in the world. But Zhansaya is, in her own words, “a persistent girl.” She persevered, applied for opportunities, and eventually won a grant from an IT fund where she studied for three months. The program took her to a summer camp in Almaty, then to Astana to receive a certificate and letter of thanks from the youth of Shymkent. Those months of study changed her deeply. She learned AI basics, communication skills,

and, more importantly, saw other people, disabled and non-disabled, navigating their own fears and stereotypes. “Seeing other people motivated me more,” she says. As someone passionate about psychology, she absorbed everything and later began using these tools in her own training and games with children, helping them become more open, more confident, more ready to stand in front of society and speak. When stress hits, she leans on a simple but powerful philosophy: “I know that this is a real situation in which there are always choices and decisions. You just need to find that path.” That is pure qairat (will), the will that refuses to sink into victimhood. She advises other people with disabilities who want to start projects:

Culturally, she holds a complex position. She deeply respects the traditions of all peoples, seeing each culture as “its own universe.” At the same time, she openly challenges the oppressive side of “uyat bolady.” For her, those words have been used to silence dreams, especially for disabled people and girls. “We are not born to be afraid,” she insists. “When someone tells you, ‘You’ll be ashamed!’ it prevents you from fulfilling your destiny.” Her stance is not rebellious for its own sake; it is grounded in faith. “If an idea came to me, it was sent by Allah,” she says. “Don’t be shy about taking steps toward your dreams, especially if Allah himself sends you these ideas.”

Her current projects “Qadam” stretch across several horizons. In the short term, she dreams of opening her own premises where people with disabilities can work as defectologists, speech therapists, and programmers, fields where their intellect and sensitivity can shine. “For special people this is very difficult,” she admits, referring to the financial and logistical barriers, “but I think we will cope with it someday.” In the long term, she wants to help special people acquire real estate. “I know very few people with disabilities who own property,” she says. Many try, but fail. For her, supporting independent living is a core part of true inclusion.

Alongside all this, she is writing a book with a co-author, oncologist and psychotherapist Akram Avdametov, a sought-after public speaking coach in Shymkent. Their meeting, like many turning points in her life, felt to her like a sign. She had been searching for a coach, drawn to him partly because cancer had taken people she loved. During his lessons she learned that public speaking is not magic but a skill, and that her main barrier was not intelligence but coordination and fear. He believed in her, invited her to intensives, and agreed to be co-author when she confessed her dream of writing. The book, tentatively titled “ Status Special,” is autobiographical, blending memoir, essay, and motivational reflection. It tackles inclusion, stereotypes, and society’s treatment of disability. “If at least one person, after reading it, believes in themselves and takes the first step towards their dream,” she says, “then everything was not in vain.” The proceeds, she has already decided, will go to charity.

In everyday life, she continues to learn, to meet new people, to run games and trainings that develop children’s intellectual abilities and help them express themselves. She sees herself not as a savior but as a fellow traveler, someone who knows from inside what it means to be stared at, pitied, underestimated, and who has chosen a different response: to create spaces where special people are seen, heard, and taken seriously.

When asked what success means to her beyond money, her answer is disarming in its simplicity: “Waking up every day is already a success in this life.” It is the answer of someone who has looked closely at fragility, at the possibility of being stuck at home because no one can accompany her, at the weight of “uyat” (shame) and yet has chosen life, movement, and service.

Her motto is clear: “Together we are strong.” In her forums, in her future centre, in the pages of the book she is writing, that line becomes an invitation, to parents, to teenagers, to sponsors, to officials, to other entrepreneurs with disabilities. She is building, slowly and persistently, a Shymkent where people with different bodies and minds do not have to beg for a seat at the table, but sit there as partners, creators, and carriers of their own missions.

In that work of stitching together her aqyl,zhurek, and qairat, of refusing both despair and arrogance, Zhansaya Namaz is quietly becoming what Abai once imagined: a Tolyq Adam, a whole person, whose very existence widens the space of possibility for others.

From the first moment she learned to see the world, the world was already blurry. Zhazira Tolegenova was born with a congenital visual impairment, inherited quietly from her father, who also lives with low vision. She says it so simply: “I have visual impairment since childhood.” But behind that sentence is a 26-year journey of adjusting to what she cannot see, and learning that what she can see is enough to shape a full life.

She grew up in Atyrau, in a family where disability was not spoken of as tragedy, but simply as a fact of life. Her father, visually impaired, worked and lived on his own terms. That example planted something powerful in her: a belief that “I feel like everyone else.” She met the man from Karagandy, married him, moved there with him and became a mother of two children. Despite the distance of 3000 km, love made this journey easy. She laughs when asked whether she prefers Qazaq or Russian for the interview, switching comfortably between languages. Identity, for her, has never been one-dimensional.

She remembers trying on many dreams, like any teenager, but one thing was always constant: entrepreneurship. “Everything I notice, I try to turn it into cash,” she says with a half-joking confidence. Where other children saw ordinary things, she saw possibility. Where others waited for allowance, she created opportunity. “The business mindset always worked automatically,” she says, not out of greed, but out of an instinct for self-direction.

In 2020, that instinct became a necessity. She was pregnant with her second child. Her husband had fallen seriously ill, “incapacitated for two years,” unable to work or bring income. They had loans, a family to support, and no salary coming in. “Something had to be done,” she recalls. And so, while the world was shutting down during COVID, she and her husband were stepping out

They registered their company, their sole proprietorship, and bought a freezer and cotton candy machine with their own limited savings. They partnered with a local ice cream factory and began selling ball ice cream from a small stand in their neighborhood. “We hired salespeople, and we stood there too,” she says. It was three months of long days, cold hands, counting coins, but they earned back every tenge and even made a small profit. More importantly, they learned something essential: they could build something together.

It gave them courage. They sold their apartment, partnered with a family friend, and opened a small doner and fastfood business, a kiosk with seating. Her husband led operations with his friend; she handled advertising and Instagram. But something felt wrong. “I couldn’t show my power,” she says gently. Surrounded by men in that business, she felt her ideas, skills, and voice didn’t fully land. Still, she stayed, learned, and waited.

After a year, she and her husband decided to step out on their own. They took their share and opened a pizzaburger-hot dog kiosk, a tiny place, but theirs. They knew nothing about kitchens, so they knew nothing about cooking, but their goal and desire were paramount.

Her husband, Aidar, became the heart of the kitchen: he personally mastered every recipe, honing the technology to a high standard. Each pizza was prepared with love, and each burger patty was handcrafted according to his own recipe. Zhazira handled the suppliers, managed Instagram, and took and processed orders. It was a risky move, but they decided to do it because they needed to survive. And it was this journey that brought them together: they became a true team.

Then burnout came, the kind that creeps in slowly. The kiosk stood in one neighborhood for two years, the days felt repetitive, and their dreams began to feel small. “We felt we were standing in one place,” she says. They wanted to scale, to reach the city, to feel alive again.

Zhazira kept thinking about how else she could complement their work: what was relevant to the neighborhood, what were people truly missing? And one day, she noticed the obvious: there was no takeout coffee where they lived. Nothing that would provide a small, urban atmosphere, the comfort of being “on the go,” and the feeling that life was moving.

She wanted to bring this tiny piece of the city to her neighborhood - the aroma of fresh coffee and a moment of joy for every passerby. Her husband immediately supported her idea

They bought a takeaway coffee kiosk, fully equipped, and signed an official contract with the national post office to place it inside one of their branches. On the first day of work, the police arrived. The land was government-owned. The permission was invalid. For six months she went from one office to another, proving paperwork, pleading for the right to simply work. “I’m not asking for money,” she remembers saying. “Just give us a chance to work.”

She showed them her disability certificate, she explained her husband wasn’t working, she showed rent receipts, she brought a lawyer from a disability rights organization, but in the end, they refused. “We lost hope,” she says quietly. They sold the coffee kiosk. They sold the doner kiosk. They started again from zero. That experience hardened something inside her, but it also clarified her path. It proved to her that she does not depend on the state to give her strength, her strength lives inside her.

And almost immediately, the next idea arrived. Qurt. A taste of childhood. A taste of roots. A taste of the steppe.

Being from Atyrau, she grew up with qurt as more than food, it was heritage. But in Karaganda, she noticed something: qurt wasn’t being celebrated. It was sold as if it were ordinary, packed loosely, handed in plastic bags, when in reality, it was a piece of national identity. Qurt that travels through centuries of nomadic history deserves respect. It deserves packaging that communicates pride.

“We have more than 10 types,” she explains. “Smoked, fruity, different shapes, not just the round salty one everyone knows.” Their innovation wasn’t only in flavor, but in story: qurt packaged in branded boxes, presented as a Qazaq national treasure, a gift for travelers leaving the country. In two years, they opened two branches inside major shopping centers.

Customers grew. Demand grew. Retail orders came. And then wholesale, even chain stores approached. But one thing bothered her: they were still reselling. To ensure quality, they wanted to produce it themselves. Despite their small capital, they and their husband rented a space for a workshop and purchased the most necessary equipment.

So she applied, again, for grants. Twice she wrote her own business plan. Twice she was rejected. She laughs softly: “I’m no documentation expert.” On her third attempt, she paid a specialist to write the business plan properly, and she won

One and a half million tenge from the akim of Karaganda, enough to start a small manufacturing room, do renovations, buy equipment, begin certifications, and call themselves producers. Now they produce seven types of qurt under their own brand, with the documents, the barcodes, the labels, the legitimacy that opens supermarket doors. “This,” she says, “is a big step for us.” It’s a credit to our entire family. Aidar is my partner in life and work, my father-inlaw always supports and helps, and our children inspire us every day to move forward. Without them, none of this would be possible.” Now they’re not just sellers—they’re manufacturers. And they proudly proclaim their product: Made in Karaganda!

But every step has a cost. Her disability has never been a barrier in her mind. “I have never once felt anything wrong with me,” she says plainly. Only one eye sees very partially; the other is almost blind. Her lenses correct what can be corrected, and what cannot, she adapts to. Sometimes she literally cannot see the details others take for granted, and yet she sees opportunities they overlook. She carries heavy boxes of qurt even though doctors say she should not lift more than three kilograms. “In the beginning… I couldn’t stop myself,” she admits. Her enthusiasm pulled her forward, but her body eventually demanded rest. In 2023 she learned, painfully, the cost of overextending herself.

She also learned that entrepreneurship means weathering moments when everything feels like failure. Some barriers she never asked to be removed. She refuses to skip medical lines meant for wheelchair users. “It is not necessary in my case,” she says. It is an internal standard, she does not want special rules. She wants the same opportunities, the chance to run. But there are gaps in the system she now sees clearly. Grants mention entrepreneurs with disabilities as priority, but “It’s not always applied.” She believes funding should truly prioritize those who face more risks. And she wants a community, “Because I don’t know any disabled entrepreneurs,” she says. “I think it is a feat to succeed with a disability. I’d be interested to meet people like that.”

Her advice to others:

She speaks with pride about the TalpynUp program, free entrepreneurship training for women. “I am always on the lookout, always learning,” she says. She never stops improving her skills, from marketing to financial literacy to mastering documentation. She studies, she adapts, she grows, and proves that economic participation is a form of empowerment. Her children already understand what business is. They unwrap packages of qurt at home and call it “our product.” They show pride before they learn the word. Entrepreneurship becomes not only a livelihood, but a legacy.

From qurt, she dreams bigger. The next goal is franchising, the opportunity to bring the product to every corner of the country. She wants their brand to become recognizable throughout Kazakhstan, a true symbol of quality and tradition—a Made in Kazakhstan brand. Expanding into all Qazaq national foods: tary, talkan, zhent, kymyz, sour cream, a whole ecosystem of heritage. She wants Qazaq youth to gift their culture, not lose it.

“Boys buy qurt to give as love gifts to girls,” she laughs. “Instead of chocolates.” Qurt becomes romance. Qurt becomes cool. Qurt becomes a statement: I know who I am.

Entrepreneurship has changed her deeply. “ I became more confident, I felt like I had found myself and could be truly useful” she says. “My circle changed. I lead meetings. I am invited to master classes. I am recognized in Karaganda.” Being seen as a businesswoman, not as someone with a disability, fills her with a sense of dignity and freedom. She knows this visibility matters for others watching quietly.

But she is honest: business takes time from family. She tries to compensate on weekends, with presence and laughter. Her children grow up seeing their parents build something real with their hands, something heavy, something traditional, something theirs. Recently, a new curiosity awakened in her. She learned, at age 32, that people with visual impairments can participate in the Paralympics. “How did I not know?” she asks, bewildered. As a child, she stretched at home, pushed her body, dreamed quietly. She assumed sports were not for “people like her.” No one told her otherwise.

She found a free adaptive sports school in Karaganda. She tried athletics and swimming for a month until the winter logistics made it difficult. She applied for a disability taxi for the first time, and learned she wasn’t eligible because she is Group 2. Still, she didn’t give up. This year she shifted into yoga, where her flexibility shines. Sports will remain part of her path now

She insists: disability information, resources, pathways, must be communicated better. Especially for those who are not active on social media, who do not know how to search.

And yet she continues seeking, and creating possibilities. Her greatest joy in business? “Giving something useful to society … Giving people jobs. Making the world a kinder place.”

There is no grand heroism in her tone, just quiet purpose. She never wanted to be someone who only receives. She wants to stand, contribute, and bring honor to the work of her hands. At the end of the interview, she says something that reveals the true core of her story: “Success is when you are satisfied with yourself, when your business grows with you and at the same time you create something valuable for others..”

She has lived her life refusing to see disability as a deficit. She has built a family business that honors national identity. She has insisted on self-determination through hardship. Each choice, bold, practical, loving, reflects a harmony of mind, heart, and will. She does not wait for someone to grant her dignity, she earns it, shapes it, brands it, and sells it in a box of qurt to passersby who may not know her name, but are nourished by her courage.

Her vision is blurry. Her future is not.