URBANA — Berik Torekhan turned away and grunted when a translator told him a grinder the city of Urbana uses at the landscape recycling facility cost more than $300,000.

Torekhan is a local government official in Kazakhstan, a Central Asian country that has been rebuilding itself since the Soviet Union released it from control two decades ago. As much as he would like to open a composting facility, it is unlikely his government could purchase a piece of equipment as large as the grinder.

But city arborist Mike Brunk and others stopped him before Torekhan could dismiss the idea completely. Though it took a couple tries because of the language barrier, they explained that the city started with a much cheaper four-wheel-drive tractor.

Governments in Kazakhstan may need to start small, too.

Torekhan is one in a group of about 30 officials from Central Asia who have visited Champaign, Urbana and Danville this week to understand how local government operates in the United States. They are here with the invitation of Marilynne Davis, a Champaign resident who works with the U.S. Agency for International Development.

"You cannot compare" the quality of infrastructure and city services in East Central Illinois to those of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Shuhrat Rozikov said through a translator. Rozikov is a government official in Tajikistan, a mountainous country that borders China and Afghanistan.

The group visited an Illinois American Water facility on Tuesday to understand "how they organized their work to provide pure water to their citizens," Torekhan said through the translator.

In Kazakhstan, "I don't know of a single place where I would drink the water from the tap," Davis said.

In Tajikistan, women sweep the streets with brooms made of twigs and leaves. Many in the group looked for similar street sweepers on Wednesday morning — "We didn't see how you clean your streets," Rozikov said — and they were unaware of the street sweepers Americans are used to.

And although the region has made great strides since independence, Davis said, garbage collection and sewage treatment are still problems. The group visited the Brickyard landfill in Danville on Wednesday, too, to see how waste is collected from homes and eventually brought to a controlled dumping site.

Recycling has become interesting to the region, Davis said. Brunk guided them on a tour of the Urbana Landscape Recycling Center, where only a few times translation became a problem. In explaining how to turn the compost piles, Brunk said workers try to keep the temperatures between 113 and 130 degrees Fahrenheit.

"How much in centigrade?" asked translator Gulru Azamova. No one really knew — so they estimated about 50 degrees Celsius.

Torekhan will not be able to open a composting facility on the scale of Urbana's tomorrow. The site in Urbana is particularly successful: It is fully supported, not by tax dollars, but by tipping fees and resale of the compost material, and the only one in Illinois that can make that claim, Brunk said.

About 70 percent to 80 percent of the waste the Central Asian region produces is organic, Davis said. Facilities like Urbana's would be very useful to divert garbage from a nearly nonexistent waste disposal system, in which many residents take their waste to unofficial, open dumping sites.

"There's a lot of interest in recycling there," Davis said. "But we're trying to explain you have to have enough to recycle."

The idea that citizens could even provide those basic services for themselves may be foreign to the visitors. Davis said most of the government officials visiting this week had been appointed, not elected by the people.

On Tuesday, the group visited a Champaign City Council meeting, where their presence was welcome — not shunned as it may have been in their home countries. They heard council members openly discuss city business and watched as residents approached the podium to give their input.

During the meeting, Mayor Don Gerard wore a traditional coat (a "chalpan") and hat (a "tubekeh"), which were gifts from the group. Earlier in the day, the group had met with Gerard, City Manager Steve Carter and Mike Monson, the chief of staff to Urbana's mayor.

Gerard's explanation that he became familiar with local government by watching city council meetings on television was a shock to the group.

"They all kind of surprisingly said, 'Uncut?'" Gerard said.

Gerard said his panel explained the basic operations of local government to the group, and he gathered that many of the visitors' philosophies were based on the concept of one central government that runs everything.

"It was a little bit of an adjustment to the notion of people for whom the concept of that much freedom is, just, they have a hard time grasping it," Gerard said. "You really get to choose how your neighborhoods are laid out, you get to choose what you do and don't want in your community."

The foreign officials have a long road ahead, Davis said, and she has been working to convey that to the group.

"We keep explaining that we don't expect you to do this in the next 50 years," she said. "It took us 150 or 200 years."