Savouring the Spring

The last month has seen Jim getting his bike out once again to wend his way through the streets of Bishkek to work and sometimes up and down mountains. We saw late snow, some sun and a lot of rain, temperatures rose slowly and with the city heating turned off we even used hot water bottles at night. And now it is 28 degrees!

Felix has taken up football again, playing three times a week at a local club. He comes back on his own on a trolleybus but occasionally there are surprises and the bus turns the wrong way. He always gets home eventually and is learning his way around the city pretty well. Rosie has been busy learning the dance, lines and songs that she will be performing in a production of “Conference of the Birds” later this month in which she takes the role of the parrot! And Jane went on retreat to a beautiful valley a few hours east of Bishkek…

Traditional embroidery is known as ‘Saima’ and a piece like this (which adorned my room) would be started when a daughter is born and sewn throughout her life until her wedding day when it would be hung and used to decorate the yurt.

Situated in the bottom of a valley, Ashu has beautiful mountain scenery all around and village life was buzzing now that the harsh realities of winter are over.

One additional highlight was the delicious Kyrgyz food; many breads, homemade jams, local honey, soups, salads and a rice and carrot dish, a bit like risotto, known as plov. We ate on the balcony of the restaurant drinking small bowls of black tea and appreciating the beauty and productivity all around us.

Well preserved...

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!

Broom Ball!

Over the last two weeks, temperatures have plummeted to between minus 20 and minus 9 degrees so we feel at last that the winter really has arrived. This has meant that the children's school, Hope Academy, has constructed a small ice-rink to play broom ball on. This is a game a bit like ice hockey but played with a large ball and brooms instead of sticks. It is proving a big hit with Felix and Rosie and getting them to actually leave school at the end of the day has become something of a challenge!

Back in August, on the first day of school, every family was invited to be orientated to the new academic year and absorb the unique atmosphere of an International School in an amazing part of the world. It is hard to imagine now, but then we were sitting in  (plus!) 35 degrees.

Felix and Rosie have now attended Hope Academy for 18 months and on the whole really enjoy it. This term Felix is taking part in the school play, and has recently been on the winning team in a school quiz competition (although he did acknowledge that in truth all the questions were all answered by just one member of the team (and it was not him!)). Rosie's favourite lessons are PE, art, computers and library - and now, broom ball! (In the top photo, Felix is on the left in the grey jacket, and Rosie is 3rd from the right, in the purple coat (and looking very small!))

Hope Academy needs more staff.

It is growing fast and is now a school of 150 children aged from 4 to 18 - a third more than last year. It was set up in 1998 as a co-operative between a number of families and has developed from there. It is staffed by some wonderfully committed people.

As well as teaching some great children from all parts of the world and working with some inspiring people, you can have an opportunity to learn Russian for free and see a lot of very beautiful mountains. You can even ski down them!

If you do know anyone who may be interested or are sensing a desire for change or adventure in your own life please take a look at the website: www.hopeacademykg.com and then get in touch with Dr Collie at the school.  Secondary Science and Elementary staff are particularly needed for mid-August 2014.

Happy (Orthodox) Christmas!

Today, 7th January, is Christmas Day! As Brits living in Central Asia we get to celebrate Christmas Day in both the last week of the old year and in the first week of the new year, which seems a very good way to start and finish! For most people in Kyrgyzstan however, Christmas is not much celebrated, and the New Year is a much bigger holiday: schools, businesses and cafes close, and this year we watched Father Frosts and Snow Maidens gather in the city’s central square on New Year’s Eve for a procession through the streets. And at midnight it seemed that everyone all over the city let off fireworks which was fantastic and which we watched with friends from the various windows of our second floor flat.

Over the holidays, we have enjoyed some time off together and have enjoyed a few trips to the nearby mountains to play in the snow! Kyrgyzstan is a very beautiful country, and although we very much enjoy living in the city, getting out and into the hills (which are only 20 minutes away!) is always refreshing and invigorating.

As we step out into 2014, the big thing on our (Oasis) horizon is the further development of anti-human trafficking work. This is something that we are both excited about and daunted by, but Oasis has worked in this area before in Kyrgyzstan and has significant experience in confronting this issue in other parts of the world and we believe that the time is right to get more involved again. We look forward to sharing some of the stories and developments that come out of this initiative.

Finally, we want to wish you all the very best for the challenges, surprises and joys that lie ahead in 2014 and to thank you for being a part of our lives and adventure here in Kyrgyzstan. And of course, on this particular day, we wish you a very Happy Christmas!

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).

A (re)opening

Last Friday we celebrated the opening of our Youth Centre. In fact it was a re-opening as we have been running the centre for about a year, but have recently moved it to our own property which had perviously housed the boys transition home. Over the last weeks we have been working with some of the young people to paint, repair and generally renovate and it was great to be able to formally open the new centre!

The youth centre is one of the ways that we meet with young people who have been brought up in government institutions such as orphanages and children's centres. Another is that we have linked each young person that has been in touch with a member of staff. Last week one of the young people contacted her 'case worker' and said that she had been thrown out of her home and was now living on the streets; please could we help? It turns out that after she had left her orphanage in the summer she had gone to work in a holiday area and had somehow come across her mother. Initially things had gone well and she had moved in with her mother, but after some time the mother became angry and threw her out. Fortunately we were able to find her a place to stay at a children's centre and will continue to walk with her over the next weeks as she tries to make a fresh start… again. 

In other news… Felix and Rosie are on half term and having a well earned rest after a busy few weeks at school. They have both recently had orthodontic treatment, which so far has gone very well and Felix will be getting a full set of braces over the holiday (lucky chap!) And we have just really enjoyed a five day visit from some friends and on their last day (yesterday) we had an hour of snow - the first of the year. It seems that autumn is about to end...!