School's Out for Summer!

Rosie writes…

We have just finished an amazing year at our school Hope Academy. Many events have been happening, now it is the holidays and we have 11 weeks off  school!

Here are some picture of what has been happening:

Sports day.

Last day of school/speech day.

A play called ‘The Conference of the Birds’!

Rosie putting the flag up on speech day.

We are looking forward to coming back to England for a month!

BYE!

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!