2009.06.06: June 6, 2009: Headlines: COS - Kazakhstan: Orphans: Fort Worth Star-Telegram: RPCV Rebekah Martin finds love is not enough after suicide of young boy she helped bring from Kazakhstan

Peace Corps Online: Directory: Kazakstan : Peace Corps Kazakhstan : Peace Corps Kazakstan: Newest Stories: 2009.06.06: June 6, 2009: Headlines: COS - Kazakhstan: Orphans: Fort Worth Star-Telegram: RPCV Rebekah Martin finds love is not enough after suicide of young boy she helped bring from Kazakhstan

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RPCV Rebekah Martin finds love is not enough after suicide of young boy she helped bring from Kazakhstan

RPCV Rebekah Martin finds love is not enough after suicide of young boy she helped bring from Kazakhstan

Maxat was buried next to Martin's father at Oakwood that Sunday afternoon when he was spoken of as a member of her family. Martin has established a fund at a local bank, hoping to raise enough money to build a playground at the home in Kazakhstan, remembering Maxat's dream to help the children there. Martin hopes that a Peace Corps volunteer can help supervise the construction. "Why did Maxat die?" one of her grandchildren asked her. "He died of a broken heart," Martin replied. Now she pores over old journals and e-mails from Maxat, trying to understand why he could not be convinced to live. Ultimately, Martin knows, she might never fully understand, and she relies on her own deep Christian faith for solace. "I want people to know about Max," Martin said. "I want him to have a legacy, the legacy of God's love. I don't want him to die and just be gone."

RPCV Rebekah Martin finds love is not enough after suicide of young boy she helped bring from Kazakhstan

Love was not enough

Drawn to an abandoned Kazakh boy, a local woman reaches out to help. But his troubles ran too deep for her to fathom

By TIM MADIGAN

tmadigan@star-telegram.com

The story of Maxat Aitbayev began in a country most Americans probably couldn't find on a map and ended a few weeks ago on a brilliant Sunday afternoon in Fort Worth. A small crowd gathered around a new mound of red clay at Oakwood Cemetery that day. They came to remember Maxat, who had turned 21 just a few weeks before, a remarkable young man who played piano and guitar, dominated at table tennis, loved little kids and was an eloquent writer.

The mourners also came to support Rebekah Martin, the woman Maxat called Mama. Martin raised four children as a single mother, taught Fort Worth students with special needs, then joined the Peace Corps after her children were grown. Her overseas assignment, at age 47, was teaching English at a children's home in Kazakhstan.

Maxat was 15 when Martin met him there in 2003. She quickly came to love him like one of her own, imagining a new life for Maxat in the U.S. as one of her family. Maybe then the dark legacy of his past would finally dissolve. Maybe then Maxat could go on to lead a happy life and help his friends left behind in Kazakhstan.

But sometimes, Martin learned, even new opportunities and unconditional love are not enough.

Maxat's story

In one photograph, Rebekah Martin is sprawled on the ground outside the children's home, surrounded by the laughing kids in a game of Duck, Duck, Goose, or Ring Around the Rosie.

In another, the children crowd into her two-room living quarters in the Kazakh institution, drawn to the thin American woman who taught them English and loved to play. Their smiling faces and tragic stories would forever be seared into Martin's memory - 250 children, from teenagers to little ones, most of them orphaned or abused.

For Martin, despite all the heartbreak, the time overseas was a dream fulfilled. She had wanted to join the Peace Corps since she was a teenager in River Oaks, a Texas girl seeking adventure in exotic lands and a chance to serve. Her father had encouraged a more conventional path. So Martin married young and had three boys and a girl by the time her marriage broke up. She took care of her family while earning undergraduate and graduate degrees from Texas Christian University, and went on to teach English and classes for children with learning disabilities in Fort Worth.

When her youngest left for college, an old yearning took hold.

"She always used to say she wanted to join the Peace Corps," said her son Seth Martin. "We told her to go. She definitely had paid her dues, and it was time for her to do what she wanted."

In June 2003, Rebekah Martin said goodbye to her family and flew off to the country that was once a part of the Soviet Union, a sprawling republic four times the size of Texas. Most homes in the Kazakh village of Alga lacked indoor plumbing. Farmers herded cattle down village streets. Winter temperatures were often below zero, and snow reached Martin's knees. Her small apartment had no shower or hot water. But with all those children tugging at her legs, she didn't have time to miss modern conveniences.

Maxat had been one face among many until one day, in her first year, he and another boy asked for extra help with their English. Martin agreed to tutor them, assigning the boys to write essays about their lives. That was how she learned Maxat's story.

His father was a successful builder in an oil-rich Kazakh city and his mother stayed at home.

"We lived very well," Maxat wrote. "Suddenly a dark cloud flew above my family."

His parents began to quarrel and eventually divorced. The boy and his mother moved to another city, where they lived in a hotel.

"I didn't like that place because my mother communicated with strangers," Maxat wrote. "They looked at my mother with passionate glances. . . . When I saw the strangers near my mother, I began to cry."

He was 4 when his mother abandoned him in the hotel. The woman who found him took Maxat to a doctor, who diagnosed tuberculosis. For the next eight years, Maxat lived in a sanatorium, watching parents of other sick children visit, waiting in vain for his own mother to return.

In 2000, he was moved to the children's home, where he became a top student, excelling in physics and the study of English, Kazakh and Russian. He planned to become a translator.

"But I also have a dream," he wrote in that essay. "My dream is to become a rich man to help poor people and children in the children's home. That's my opinion, and no one can change that."

Looking for freedom, not a child

Rebekah Martin's life was changed by what she read, although she would have difficulty understanding exactly why. Maxat's story, after all, was just one of many in that school. She had her own children, five grandchildren and a full life back in the United States. She wasn't looking for another child to raise.

"I was actually looking for freedom," Martin said recently. "I wasn't looking for him. Then, when I read his essay. . . . I talked to him about it the next day, talked to him about his mother. I was drawn toward him. I think a lot of it was that we could communicate. I was learning Russian. He was good in English. Everything in my being said: 'I want this boy to be my son. I want him to come to America. I don't want to leave him here.' "

On Sept. 26, 2004, Martin posted this on her family's Web site:

"I want to pursue adopting a 16-year-old boy in the home here. He speaks English very well, and has a gentleness about him that is dear to me. He wrote this essay and it touched my heart. It would not be hard to be his mother."

On that last point, however, she couldn't have been more mistaken.

In the United States

Kazakh laws prevented Martin from adopting Maxat, and in 2005, a family illness prompted her to return to the United States six months before her Peace Corps stint was to end. Maxat eventually left the children's home and entered a university in Kazakhstan, studying to become a translator. He and Martin exchanged dozens of e-mails and telephone calls.

"No, it's impossible to forget you," Maxat wrote once. "You know that very well."

Their reunion came in 2008, when Maxat obtained a visa to come to the United States. Martin paid his travel expenses, met his plane in New York City, and brought him back to her comfortable home in the rolling hills of northwest Fort Worth. The quiet, solicitous young man had his own room. He was dumbfounded by the dishwasher and wondered who had invented the can opener.

Maxat was also embraced by Martin's children, and he became a favorite of her nieces, nephews and grandchildren. He obtained a Texas driver's license, and signed up for guitar and piano lessons. He and Martin spoke again about adoption. In September, Maxat enrolled at Tarrant County College and made straight A's in government, geology and English.

"He didn't need to be in my class," said Cheryl Roberts, Maxat's teacher this semester in English composition. "He already knew what I could teach him, even though English was not his first language. He had a gift."

Roberts recognized that in Maxat's first essay, an analysis of a poem by Theodore Roethke, My Papa's Waltz.

"Personally, [the poem] reminds me of my father, whom I lost in 1992 when I was four years old," Maxat wrote. "Although I did not dance a waltz with my father around a kitchen, I remember him playing on the guitar and singing, with the sour and strong smell of beer on his breath. Even though he smelled of alcohol, I did not know it was bad. I just wanted to see him because I enjoyed being with him, playing and singing."

Roberts submitted Maxat's essay to be published in a TCC anthology. The teacher wept when reading it again a few weeks ago.

"I was amazed," she said. "He had so much to offer, not only with his intellect, but he was so pleasant and polite. I was just shocked when I heard what happened. I truly could not believe it."

A troubling discovery

Martin learned about Maxat's depression soon after his arrival. He said he felt guilty for his blessings when his friends in Kazakhstan still lived in deprivation. Old abandonments had left him full of shame. A recent convert to Christianity, Maxat told Martin that he wanted to go to heaven and see Jesus.

At first, only Martin knew of his profound melancholy. They took long walks and talked for hours as she tried to convince him how much he was loved by her family and by God. Martin spoke of his bright future, of getting married and having children, of making enough money to help his friends in Kazakhstan.

"I like your dreams," he said, but he did not believe that they would ever come true.

On Feb. 10, after a birthday party for her daughter-in-law, Martin helped Maxat with his homework. Then, as was his habit, he went for a walk alone in the neighborhood. More than an hour passed and Maxat had not returned, so Martin called his cellphone.

"Thanks for all you've done, but I don't want to live, and I want to get away," Maxat said.

Martin rushed outside with her phone.

"Where are you?" she cried.

"Turn left," Maxat said.

Martin ran until she came to a huge tree.

"Now look up," Maxat said.

He was sitting on a large limb, one end of a belt around his neck, the other attached to the limb.

"Come down from there," Martin yelled.

Maxat calmly disentangled the belt and shimmied down from the tree. He and Martin returned home, where they read the Bible together. She stayed in his room until he had gone to sleep.

'There are lots of trees'

The next day, Maxat talked with a counselor at Martin's church. She took him to see a physician, who prescribed a powerful anti-depressant and said that Maxat needed to be hospitalized for his depression.

"I won't go to the hospital," Maxat said. "I will run away."

But the medicine seemed to help. Maxat spent more time at the college playing table tennis with other students. He began to make friends. During spring break in mid-March, Martin and Maxat took her grandchildren to the Fort Worth Zoo, and Maxat and three of the children slept two nights on a trampoline in the back yard.

On March 27, the family convened again to celebrate his 21st birthday. Martin's mother baked him a birthday cake, Maxat's first. Among his presents were a soccer ball and the promise of a German shepherd puppy. For more than an hour, Maxat played the guitar and sang while Martin's nieces accompanied him on piano and violin. In the photographs from that night, Maxat is beaming. Around that same time, he began to call Rebekah Martin "Mama."

But in the quiet moments, when it was just the two of them, it was evident that his inner darkness lingered.

"I'm going to cut down that tree," Martin told him once.

"There are lots of trees," Maxat replied.

If Maxat took his own life, she asked him, how would she explain that to the nieces, nephews and grandchildren who loved him?.

"He looked at me like that had never occurred to him," Martin said. "But life was just too hard for him. He would say, 'I know I have clothes. I know I have food. I know I have a family. But I don't feel any of it.' "

On April 22, Maxat skipped his piano lesson and came home late at night, refusing to say where he had been. The next morning he did not want to get out of bed. Martin left for her teaching job and spoke with him by telephone in the afternoon. They made plans to see each other that night, but when she got home at 8 p.m. the place was empty. Maxat had left his wallet in his bedroom and a long note on his bed. It said that he was thankful for his time in Martin's home, but that he did not want to live and that he would see her in heaven.

Martin frantically called his cellphone but discovered that Maxat had left that by his bed, too.

"There are lots of trees," Maxat had said.

Fort Worth police found his body a few hours later.

Seeking Maxat's legacy

Maxat was buried next to Martin's father at Oakwood that Sunday afternoon when he was spoken of as a member of her family. Martin has established a fund at a local bank, hoping to raise enough money to build a playground at the home in Kazakhstan, remembering Maxat's dream to help the children there. Martin hopes that a Peace Corps volunteer can help supervise the construction.

"Why did Maxat die?" one of her grandchildren asked her.

"He died of a broken heart," Martin replied.

Now she pores over old journals and e-mails from Maxat, trying to understand why he could not be convinced to live. Ultimately, Martin knows, she might never fully understand, and she relies on her own deep Christian faith for solace.

"I want people to know about Max," Martin said. "I want him to have a legacy, the legacy of God's love. I don't want him to die and just be gone."

How to help For those who want to help with Maxat's legacy, Rebekah Martin has established a fund, Maxat Aitbayev Memorial Fund for Children's and Youths' Home in Kazakhstan. Chase Bank, 6543 Lake Worth Blvd., Fort Worth, TX 76135.

TIM MADIGAN, 817-390-7544




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Headlines: June, 2009; Peace Corps Kazakhstan; Directory of Kazakhstan RPCVs; Messages and Announcements for Kazakhstan RPCVs; Orphans





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Story Source: Fort Worth Star-Telegram

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