Kulanda Makhanova

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.