After three months, Jane is coming to the
end of her life skills cookery course which she has run fortnightly at the Oasis Youth Centre. The group of eight young people, plus two Oasis staff are great fun to be with and are
always keen to get stuck in. Of course one of the highlights is that they
get to eat what they have made at the end of the lesson!
Amongst other things, they have
made soups, salads, cakes and rice dishes, learnt five ways to cook potatoes and soon will be
doing some preserving of fruits and vegetables. This is something that many Kyrgyz households do and makes good economic sense: last summer, tomatoes cost about 20 com (approx. 22p) per kilo, but now, at the end of winter they are around 150 com (about £1.70). Jane is learning this skill too, so a
colleague will teach that session of the cookery course, and then the group will
then have one final challenge; to plan, shop for and cook a meal of their
choice for 4 in their final week of the course. Hopefully they can put it all
into practice.
We had a local-style brick stove
built in the main room of the youth centre at the start of the winter and it
has become such a warm, welcoming place to be; a home from home for the young
people who go there and have never known a family environment.
Meanwhile, during March, Jim attended the annual spring Oasis meetings which this year were in the UK. It was a full and useful schedule, and was great to be with colleagues, learn from each other, and consider how best to continue to develop Oasis' work around the world. He also visited one of Oasis' Academies in Enfield (Oasis Academy: Hadley) which has recently been in the news because of the way the staff are supporting a student who is facing deportation just before she takes her final A level exams (google 'Yashika Bageerathi'). In fact, Jim was there the day that the girl was detained, and it was moving to see how the student body and staff responded to this news of how one of their community was suffering and have rallied around her.
Jim was able to celebrate his birthday in airports this year as he flew home… and, because of time differences, it was only 18 hours long! But the next day, we went with some friends up into the nearby mountains and had a spectacular birthday picnic and cricket match!
