A Season of Change

The snow has come! Yesterday we were walking around in 15 degrees and it felt a bit like Spring but, as predicted, the clouds have moved in overnight and after some rain, the city has turned white. We can’t help but find it exhilarating at this stage, especially as it is not very cold yet and there was much excitement about the first snowy walk to school this morning.

Other areas of our lives are changing too. Our Russian teacher will be on maternity leave from December to April so we will continue to study using a number of courses we have.  Jane will also begin to give cookery lessons at the Youth Centre every fortnight which she hopes will help to develop her spoken Russian. Putting down our three weekly lessons for the winter will change some of the routines of our week that have been in places since we arrived 15 months ago. It does feel liberating but we very much hope we can sustain some of the language-learning momentum we have gathered.

Another significant recent change in our lives is that from April next year one of our main supporting groups have decided that after sixteen years of faithful partnership, the time has come to part ways as they feel that they and Oasis are moving in different directions. This is sad but not unexpected news for us and means a change in how some of our support is provided. We are working hard on putting that in place but financially this leaves a significant gap. If you would like to support us in any way please do get in touch to find out more about how that could be done.

Lastly, we could not have foreseen that our colleagues, The Walkers, who re-joined us in May  (having been evacuated with their baby son in September 2012) would be leaving again so soon. They recently resigned from Oasis (for reasons unrelated to our work together in Kyrgyzstan) and will finish their work with us this month. We will miss them very much. Such are the challenges of team leadership!

Winter is coming!

Last Friday, for the first time the temperature was a shade below zero degrees centigrade as we set off for school. The skies are still clear and blue and the days beautiful, but there is definitely a chill in the air. One of our colleagues claims that she can smell that snow is on it's way…

In some ways the coming of winter is fun, especially as it brings the possibilities of winter sports! Rosie has recently started ice skating lessons and the thought of getting up into the mountains with snow on the ground excites us all! But we are also aware that for many people it is actually very difficult and miserable when it gets cold. In particular, we are mindful of one of the boys who Oasis has walked with over the last few years and who had lived in the transition home that we were running, but who has recently chosen to start living on the streets again. Sadly, despite working hard over the summer to get himself enrolled at an art school, and making a good start both in the studies and in settling into a dormitory, he has been encouraged by some of his old 'friends' to return to his former way of life, has dropped out of the college and is living on the streets of the city.

On a happier note, a couple of weeks ago we were contacted out of the blue by a local organisation who had 19 boxes of winter clothes for us to distribute! It turns out that we had written to them about a year and a half ago and not heard anything back… They however, had not forgotten us, and when they recently received a consignment of packages from the US, they earmarked some of them for us! It has been really good to be able to pass these on to many of the young people that we are walking with (including, of course, the chap mentioned above).