Project Review

Over the last week we have been doing an intensive review of our transition homes, which Oasis has been running in Kyrgyzstan for two and a half years. It has been amazing to hear about what has been achieved... all the young people have continued with their education and some have done really well; two are preparing for university (unheard of for young people from the Reform School which is a bit like Borstall); we have helped some of the young people to receive official documents such as passports and birth certificates which they had not had previously and which are vital in order to get a job; all but one have done internships and had work experience; we have helped some of them to find and contact family members; and all have been kept safe from involvement in serious crime and from being trafficked. This last point is not to be underestimated; for girls from orphanages in particular, there is a high possibility that they may end up working in the sex industry and indeed all the girls in our transitional home know of friends from the institutions where they grew up who have ended up as commercial sex workers.

But alongside all the achievements there are things that have not gone so well; transitional care homes are expensive to run, the costs are on-going, and we have never been able to fund the work as we would like to; for the staff who are with the young people each day the work is also intense and we have not been able to find enough people willing to take on this work for the long term that is needed to build relationships; and helping the young people to move to a point of genuine independence has not happened as well as we would have liked.

The next exciting step is to look to the future - how do we take all these lessons from what has been achieved and what has not gone so well, and improve our work with young people to help them to make a successful transition from a life dependant on the institutions where they have been brought up, to life on their own? There are no easy answers...

Christmas Holidays!

December 25th is not a special holiday in Kyrgyzstan; we even had a discussion as to whether we would close the office (we did!). The children though had broken up from their school so Jim took a few days off and we enjoyed a few days together at home. Christmas Day itself was very different to usual; we got up early and set off early to the nearby mountains to go skiing! As it was not high season and a normal work day, the pistes were almost empty, and Jim and Felix tried snowboarding for the first time. Felix is now hooked and unlikely to ever step into skis again! Christmas lunch was a ham roll each, but Jane had prepared a wonderful roast for the evening and we all thoroughly enjoyed our first December 25th in Bishkek.

On the last day of 2012 we completed our family challenge for the year of running 1,000 km (see our running blog - link on the right). We ran in melting snow and +4 degrees which felt almost tropical after the temperatures of the previous few weeks.

Whilst Christmas Day is not a holiday, the New Year is, and big time! We saw the old year out and the new year in at our flat with some friends and at midnight watched from our balcony as fireworks erupted all over the city in celebration. There was no planned display - people simply set them off wherever they were, and the sky was constantly lit up. It was an impressive sight!

And as for new years resolutions... we recently watched 'the Age of Stupid', a film set in the future and imagines what the world might be like after catastrophic climate change. The narrator looks back to 2008, when human beings still had the opportunity to do something and asks why we didn't. It is was a timely reminder and prompt about the realities of human induced climate change and our response to it. Among other things, we will work out our carbon footprint now that we are living in Bishkek (and making more flights) and work out how we can both reduce and take responsibility for it.