The Silk Road

The Silk Road was an ancient trade route; goods produced in China (including paper, jade and, obviously, silk) travelled West, whilst glass and silverware, spices and wool (to name a few) travelled East. There was not one fixed road, but a network of routes, and all passed through Kyrgyzstan; in fact today one of the main streets in the city is called 'the Silk Road' - and we live just off it.

The presence of this route meant that a millennium ago this part of the world was bustling - and very wealthy. Large cities dotted the route, and last weekend we joined a trip to visit a number of these. Today they are just archaeological sites in the middle of rather beautiful countryside and quite some imagination is required to picture them as they might have been. We stood on the small hillock pictured (right) and were told that it was part of the largest human-moved mound of earth anywhere in the world, ever, and was the base of a city where hundreds of thousands of people lived.


We discovered that various religions co-existed at this time on the Silk Road; alongside Islam, there is evidence of a thriving Nestorian Church, of Zoroastrianism, and Buddhism. We saw mounds that were once Buddhist temples; and came across an ancient Zoroastrian necropolis, where bones were piled after the (somewhat grizzly-sounding) burial rites were performed - the photo shows a 1,000 year old (or so) skull that has recently been exposed.




It was a fascinating day, and it is extraordinary to consider that Kyrgyzstan was once at the physical heart of the global economy.

Spring

Spring has arrived in a big way in the last few weeks; turning a bare and brown city into a garden. There are trees everywhere in Bishkek and the transformation has been fast and gorgeous. The park outside our kitchen window is bursting with colour again and we recently found out that tulips are native to Kyrgyzstan and grow wild in valleys here.

Jim is back on his bike and enjoying some longer rides at the weekends. This coming Saturday he is joining a local group for a 50km cycle event. He has also started work again on his MA dissertation after a 10 month break whilst we got settled, and is looking forward to finishing it (which he has to do by the end of June!)

We celebrated Easter by watching the sun rise over Bishkek a few weeks ago. And we are still enjoying some special Easter breads and egg decorating this week, because Orthodox Easter is this coming Sunday.

For Oasis the coming month is looking busy in a number of ways, not least with new arrivals: two of our colleagues have just had their first child, a little boy and all doing well. The Walkers, the family that were evacuated back in September with a very ill one month old are returning soon, so we are all very much looking forward to that. Also, today, a short-term volunteer arrived to join our team for six months. Meanwhile we continue to make progress with the necessary changes to help Oasis empower vulnerable young people. To be honest, much of this would make pretty uninteresting reading for a blog (the development of financial systems, strategic planning, fundraising, staff training and so on) but we are seeing progress and are encouraged at the way things are developing.

Beware the (r)ides of March...

The Noorus festival (the second public holiday of the month!) marks the  first day of Spring and is a big celebration in Central Asia. In Bishkek, people were out and about, visiting friends, eating special meals and generally celebrating together. As it was also Jim's birthday, and he had just returned from a ten day trip away for Oasis meetings, and it was the first day of school holidays for Felix and Rosie, it was an extra celebration! We wandered around the city enjoying the atmosphere and ended up on a big wheel - the 'Bishkek eye'?!

Beware the (r)ides of March...!

Now that is a real kebab...

The Oasis meetings went well and it was great to be with people who are both colleagues and friends, some of whom we have known for ten to fifteen years. It is exciting to hear how work is going in different parts of the world, and esecially to hear about how work continues in Mozambique, in particular among widows who are HIV+ and with the development of a new project to improve community health and hygiene and which is helping over a thousand households to live more safely.

Meanwhile, back in Kyrgyzstan, Oasis is facing a number of significant challenges as we seek to develop increasing sustainability for our work. In particular, we are helping the young people currently in our two transition homes to move towards living independantly over the next five months and this is taking a lot of energy; we are developing a strategy that will help young people to make a better transition from living in government institutions to living independantly; and we are working out how to fund all this in a sustainable way. It is quite a challenge and there are times when project finances have been extremely tight and uncertain.

And finally, a very Happy Easter! We are looking forward to celebrating in the mountains as the sun rises. We will have two Easters this year, as we will also be able to celebrate it on May 5th with friends who are a part of the Orthodox Church!

International Women's Day

Today, the people of Kyrgyzstan are celebrating International Women's Day in a BIG way. Everybody has the day off and the shops and roads were frenetic with shoppers and cars yesterday as people bought gifts for their wives, mothers and daughters. It is a bit like Mothers Day but everywhere men great you with a "congratulations!"

The children have had a day off school so we headed for a snowy walk in the mountains with two other families. On Wednesday we were in t-shirts and it was 25 degrees centigrade and within a day it was minus 3 and snowing hard.

We have had two mornings of fantastic strategic planning with our team this week, thinking about how Oasis might best enable young people to make a positive and successful transition from institutional life into society and a community of their own. It has been great to have a colleague from Oasis UK here for the week to journey with us through this process.

But the highlight of the week for me (Jane) was hearing from two Kyrgyz women at the International Women's Club on Tuesday morning.

One woman told us her story of being bride-napped 15 years ago and how she escaped. Another told us about being a mother in law and having daughters in law in this culture. Their stories were a stark and very real reminder to me of the situation of many young women here who face the threat of bride-napping every day, as it is such a prevalent practice in Kyrgyzstan. It has also made me appreciate that I have grown up with a lot of freedom and many great opportunities as a woman in my own culture.

So to all you women out there: you are awesome! Speak out, be who you are, have courage...you are beautiful!

Six months today!

Today we have been in Kyrgyzstan for six months!

Overall, we have really enjoyed our first six months here. There has been much that has been great, such as our lovely flat, our Oasis colleagues, and Felix and Rosie's wonderful school. There have (of course!) been plenty of challenges - communicating in Russian is high on this list! And there has been plenty that has been unexpected (walking to school in minus twenty degrees is not as unpleasant as it sounds!) We have made some friends and plenty of mistakes (back to the Russian language challenge again!) and experienced the high and the lows of culture shock. The photos at the end of the post might give a flavour of our first few months.

There is much to celebrate for Oasis over these last six months; we have grown as a team, certainly numerically (there are currently 12 of us), but more importantly in our relationships, respect for one another and in how we work together. We have started a youth centre for young people leaving government institutions (so called 'social-orphans') and have nearly completed a life-skills course at the government 'Reform Home' for some of the more 'difficult' young people that are in government care. And organisationally we are making good strides in developing better finance processes and organisational sustainability.

The review we wrote about in our last post has led us to start working intensively with the ten young people currently in the Oasis transitional homes to help each one of them to live independently within the next six months. Whilst this is a challenging prospect for each one of them, it will be a really positive step and we will walk with them through the transition and for some time afterwards, providing the support, encouragement and help that they will need as they make decisions.

 Independence Day Celebrations (August 31st) 

   

Oasis Team Meal at our flat (September)

Mountains 30 minutes south of Bishkek (October)

Rosie in end of term play (December)

 Finishing our joint 1,000km run, Bishkek (December 31st)

Skiing in the mountains south of Bishkek, Chinese New Year (February)

The view from our kitchen window (much of December, January and February!)

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.