There is an old Kazak saying: The snow leads the sheep.

As the snow leads the sheep, the sheep once led the Kazakh. Over hundreds of years, my people styled their lives around movement. Our ancestral home, the yurt, is something like a native American tepee. Circular, poled, and portable. Its design is functional. Above all it allowed us to move. The yurt door opened to the east and faced the rising sun, which in the morning shone through the door onto our handmade saddles placed in the center of our temporary homes.

Just outside the door, we corralled our young animals. In the West, in the rich lands of America, animals live far from the people. Our animals were our constant companions—like the elephant handling mahouts of Thailand, whose lives are intertwined with their beasts. We lived in the same fields as our foals and flocks. We gave each other life. We squeezed sheep’s milk, boiled mutton to eat by hand, baked nai ge da, a milk dough is eaten with cheese, or fried it in horse fat. As Khan Qasim said five centuries ago: “We are men of the steppe; all our wealth consists of horses, their flesh is our favorite food, mare’s milk our best drink. Houses we have none. Our chief diversion is to inspect our flocks and our herds of horses.”

Before the winter we slaughtered animals, smoked, and cured their flesh to eat during the dark months when the temperature fell to four-degrees below zero. It was then that our yurts became deathly cold. We left again. Turning our backs on the frozen mountain pastures. We would trek dozens of miles down to the river valleys. We built mud-brick houses, lived on our smoked meat, and watched the herds and flocks turn up scraps of offal and whatever dried grass they could eat in the fields.

In every season our homes were open to visitors, both those we had invited and those we hadn’t. I’ve learned that just as American people live far from their animals—their source of physical life, Americans live far from each other—their source of spiritual life. I have lived in America. I have become an American.

I know the quieting white blanket of the Colorado and North Carolina snows. I cannot forget that in the winter valleys of Kazakhstan, my ancestors received guests on cushions. On carpets. There we lived so close to the earth and the animals and to people.

We filled our mud-brick homes with life without limit.

In Kazakhstan, the guest is given the best. The throat of a sheep of our flocks would be slit, its blood pumped out, the meat of its body skinned and cooked without salt, and the sheep’s head would be carried on a platter to the guest at his honored place. He would be honored simply for being the guest. (Can you imagine?) He would cut a slice from the right cheek—which is the finest meat, a delicacy, and he would serve this to the head of the household. He would slice the left ear, and give this to the children. Then the feast would begin. Everyone would eat. And is simply how my ancestors lived life on the steppes. Sitting for hours. Families moving in and out. Always waiting on the guests, who gave our homes life—for the Kazakhs know something that the Americans have forgotten.

Hope and hospitality are twins.

It was our honor. Our duty to abide by the custom of courtesy. To offer our friends and relatives a deep supply of milk tea. In the summer you could hear jostling inside the horsehide barrels called shubat—filled with sour, fermented horse-milk wine.

This is a taste of my heritage.

Except, I am not a man of the steppe. I am a Kazakh woman. A modern, Russian speaking woman, whose ancient land was overturned by the Soviet Union and then made free again. I am a modern woman, the daughter of engineers who has practically never touched an animal but instead moved crude oil through pipes and processing plants that have taken over the edges of the foothills of my ancestral land.

I have traveled and seen much. Not on a horse’s legs, but my own. I am a doctor. Yet I am forever drawn to my heritage. I also cannot escape it. People look at me. They’re curious about the shape of my eyes, and even more curious when they hear my strange accent and wonder where on earth I am from.

I do, too.

In a land filled with dark-eyed people, I have green eyes, and I was born with blond hair. Although my blond hair turned dark while I was still an infant, my green eyes remained the same. The late archeologist, Dr. Davis-Kimball, a horse-rider and rancher herself, discovered a link to today’s few blond-haired, green-eyed Kazakh women, and an ancient race of Kazakh warrior women. While history is written by the men, she discovered the skeleton of a warrior princess in Pokrovka, Kazakhstan, who was buried with gold jewelry, a large sword by her left hand and dagger in her right. She was buried with pots and other artifacts, which showed she was not only a warrior but held a high status among her brethren.

This discovery was very special to me because it changed the way I saw my own green eyes, which to me had always been a puzzle. I have always been a puzzle. If not to myself—then to those around me. But perhaps, I am simply a warrior woman, as different in my lifestyle and outlook as my green eyes are.

Kazakhstan is three times the size of Texas. In some places, people look Chinese or Mongolian. We have many nationalities, and while people assume it is ‘Asian,’ the reality is far more complex, and in my case Russian—because that is the language that I grew up speaking. Since I look Asian, people have always asked me silly questions with no relation to reality—like, “Do you know Kung Fu?” While I may be descended from a warrior princess, I don’t know Kung Fu. I was raised simply. In a small, cold, Soviet-style desert town called Kulsary, off the coast of the Caspian Sea, where it was rare to be the green-eyed one.