Travelling Yonder

Bags packed.  The sky is dark.  The birds have not bothered to sing.  The driver awaits.  Another day in the life of a travelling humanitarian.  You recall the comments from the previous night on the Taftan, “With over 100 flights a year, I could eat only lentils, but I can’t be green”.  

The dusty road traverses the roundabout, all traffic heading in one direction.  The airport stands out, not for its size nor status, but for the mayhem that ensues.  Bag in one hand, ticket in the other.  Routine is familiar.  The security machine beeps, but they wave you through.  You wait in queue.  You wait in queue.

The doors fly open, they say something in Russian.  Everyone gets up, you follow through.  On a bus to nowhere, not long enough to breathe more than thrice.  They call out row by row, you wait til the end.  All aboard.  Doors close. Heat increases.  You slowly roll.  The roar of the engine isn’t what you expect.  Not twin props today, a “new:” 15 year old Jet.  It’s hot, darn hot.  The windows are clouded. The plane is crowded.  You taxi to the run way.

Without a moments pause, BOOM.  The airplane is in full throttle. Rocking side to side, racing down the runway.  Bump. Bump.  And…. Silence.  Smooth.  The wings catch the air, and like the falcons that hunt the wolves, you’re stealthily creeping through the atmosphere.

Round and round, the plane turns.  180, 360, 540, 720 degrees.  Up and up, like a spiral staircase.  International airspace beckons, and finally you get there.  From Osh over to the Uzbekistani Ferghana Valley, and now the flight begins to make purpose.  Over the crops, over the pastures.  Swathes of green and yellow patches. Is this where the Turkish get their inspiration for their rugs? 

The valley falls away, rising green hills take its place.  Not for much longer. Higher and higher, the plane creeps.  Higher and higher, the mountains peak.  Have you ever seen the land so tall?. Have you ever seen mountains touching the sky at all?  The barrier between mountain, haze and sky disappears.  You feel infinitesimally small. The Tien Shan, the impenetrable range, sits below you, so close you feel you could just walk out on to it.  From this height, all the rugged rocks look smooth, like a carpet covering the world.   It’s the dead of summer, and the peaks are snow capped.  The depths and sizes of these Christmas like patches vary, larger and deeper on the shady side of the mountain.   

The ice-cream peaks give way to the rolling green hills.  The steppes are punctuated with veins and canals, carrying the life blood of Central Asia to its dependents.  Thick, grey and rocky, these veins spread in every direction from the mountains.  Flowing fast even at its lowest levels.  The water is a never ending source of life, of conflict.  Who’s first, who’s next.  The rivers sway in a rhythmic motion, taking the blood of the mountains to far away lands.  Canals tap the veins, straight lines tear through the landscape.  Cotton was the future, and these canals feed nobody but das capitalist, not even Marx or Engels gets his feed.  The borders are near, but the veins get thinner and thinner.  Canal after canal, the rivers are tapped. Tick tock, the conflict has stopped? 

Fields and fields, patches and patches.  Tapestry of life is below.  Cotton, corn, melon, cherries, wheat, apricots, and potatoes.  Vroom vroom, they disappear.  Like a stuntman, the plane rocks from left to right.  The tarmac appears to be heading in the wrong direction.  A handbrake turn at a thousand feet? The Ruske is mad, thinking he is in a Cessna, Messerschmitt or Tiger Moth.  Bank hard to right.  Drop hundreds of feet. Being pushed by the wind, left and right and back again.  Straightening up, dropping like a stone… the heart waits to beat, while the hands hold the seat in front sturdily…

Thud, skid and slide… the plane hits the ground hard and the Ruske wrestles control.  He doesn’t slow it down as it rushes past the black sheep, until the turnoff when he decides to taxi.   You look around and notice Manas International Airport for what it is.  Over a dozen herculean black planes lie the runway, gaping anuses you could drive a tank through, marked with U.S. in-signatories.  This is the World’s Game of Chess, each team has chosen their colour.  In Osh, lies a graveyard of white behemoths from the 1990s, wondering whether they will be re-instigated with Putin’s Fervour.  And behind the gaping anuses of Manas, lie a second row of planes with more aerials than a Bangladesh apartment building. 

You push through the wall of sound, “taxi taxi taxi”, you see the sign with your logo on it.  Sergey my old man, glad to see you.  “Offis?”, “Dah”. You take a deep breath, and you’re not sure whether you’re at your second home in Bishkek or whether you have no home. 

Rebuilding Today’s Communities for Tomorrow’s Future

The history of Kyrgyzstan runs as deep as the valleys in the Tien Shan.  From the domestication of the apple over 10,000 years ago, to the rampant expansion of Islam, and to Marco Polo’s adventures along the Silk Road.  Kyrgyzstan has been at the epicentre of cultural and social transformations from the East and the West.  An Islamic ‘lite’ country, visited by Solomon himself, which is unlike any other.

Islamic minarette in Uzgen

Modern history bubbles on the surface.  It’s on every street corner, it’s in every house.  When the country fell to Socialist Soviet Republic in the early 20^th century, it quickly started losing it’s identify and adopting a new one.  The nomadic ways of the Kyrgyz started being melded with the urban Russians and the neighbouring Uzbeks.  United they served the Proletariat, the State, and Lenin.

Statue of Lenin in the centre of Osh city.

And as the Socialist Experiment fails, the boundaries of autonomous regions that intended to ensure there was no clear majority become the boundaries of new States sent out by their Mother Country to be independent countries.  It surprises no one that these fragile and newly industrialising states struggle to quell the ethnic tension.  And in June 2010, Southern Kyrgyzstan, the melting pot bubbles over: four days of rampant inter ethnic violence ensues, and the damage is done. Two thousand houses, hundreds of lives, and unenviable level of social destruction through the half a million internally displaced people.  While the emergency is over for now, the reconstruction and development continues.

All that remains is rubble from this house, ransacked and burned

How does one rebuild a life?  Mallow let’s us know where to begin, with the foundations.  The first  foundations of hundreds of houses we are building are being laid now. It has taken a long time for us to get to this point: communities not wanting to return for fear of further uprisings, provision of temporary shelters, beneficiaries needing to prove they are fair dinkum, designs for hundreds of houses needing approvals through Government mechanism, and etcetera.  But the show has begun, and it is a race against time.  In six month, this country will have ground to a halt.  Everything will be frozen over.  Nobody will be able to construct a house, and nobody will survive without a roof over their heads with solid walls holding it up.  So for now, we turn up the heat and push through.

Digging trenches for the foundations

The challenges we face are immense.  Building 500 houses across two Rayons requires a lot of attention and planning, and a heck of a lot of elbow grease and doing.  Our engineers are on site daily inspecting houses and providing technical advice.  Our supervisors are inspecting over 100 trucks per day delivering rocks, gravel, sand with rocks and gravel, nails, screws, wood, door, wiring, you name it.  Our logistics team is the most overworked of the lot, send and receiving RFQ, BOQs, CNs, and tenders.  Finance is awash in contracts.  Administration is filing everything, Human Resources is dealing with everyone, and foundations keep being laid everyday.

Technical officers supporting beneficaries' housing construction

 

It’s hard work.  Sweat drips from every brow.  Beneficaries are knackered.  Our staff are knackered.  I am knackered.  Our knackers are knackered.  But sometimes all it takes is a slice of watermelon for everything to be ok.

Plump watermelons litter the countryside, a refreshing break during a hot days work

Humanitarian Wonderer

You may wonder, what drives someone to the Kyrgyz Republic? A Stan by everything but name, and even that is debatable.  Kyrgyzstan.  Perhaps a trivia question, “Name a country with only one vowel”, or “Which country has an exclave that is triple landlocked”, or “Where would you find the most northerly mountain about 7,500km”?  Maybe it was just a spin of a globe.

This line of work tends to lead one to the outposts of modern day governance.  Where conflict is merely a poll away, and development seems like a never ending source of debate.  Kyrgyz isn’t the most dangerous country in the world – sitting at Phase 3 of most five phase security indicators, there is still Afghanistan and Libya, though even some organisations have them on par.  Surely, that is due to change, one year after the riots, uprising and mass social unrest the indicators are likely to drop to a comfortable Phase 2.

Kyrgyz is also not the least developed country in the world – you can thank the Soviets for that, providing what remains of the infrastructure for health, education, and the like.  Jarred Diamond and the Silk Road would probably add some further reasons why it is sitting at c.150 out of 220 countries in the world... though quibble as you may over a few dollars here and there, pockets of poverty fill the pants of Central Asia.

No.  There is nothing specific about Kyrgyz, except for the temporal and spatial alignment that exists between me and it for now.

Humanitarian work is a never ending business.  The perfect business model, with an insatiable demand limited only by the generosity of around 30 countries in the world.  However, Kyrgyz is not high on the list.  It seems like a forgotten country, hidden in the shadows of the Tien Shan mountains.  There are a few expatriate people here, many looking for the next conflict or disaster to move on to, others wondering if the development funds will ever truly flow to this unstrategic place.  

The Sun sets.  It’s high summer, and it seems to last forever.  All the kings horses and all the kings men have repatriated themselves, though the humanitarian workers remain.  In compounds, behind walls.  Talking shop, with work lasting as long as the sunsets.  The Moon is high, bursting at it seems.  The heat dissipates, from a dry hot 42c to cooler 18c. 

Evening has arrived and the mood changes.  The lady of the compound has left us her days work, oil with potatoes and chicken on the side.  They eat.  They smoke.  They talk.  They retire.  For tomorrow, the fight continues for approvals to lay foundations of the 500 houses. 

Kyrgyz Waking

Alone, I sit here.  The sun struggles to set behind the mountains, the dark is warred off by the last specks of rays.  The sounds of children laughing in the deep background, playing amongst the noise of dogs barking, traffic whizzing by, and the barely audible call to prayer.  Is this a dream, have I been here before?

The table in the centre of the courtyard is covered in a plastic table cloth.  The compound is closed to all visitors.  Curfew will begin in shortly, and all the mice return home.  The cheese is laid out for the dreamers, free for all to take.  Except the dog, who is shooed off with a stamping foot.

Alone, the water sits here.  In a bottle, protected from the elements.  It's hot.  Darn hot.  Everything sweats, including the minor birds who dip in the Chineese pool bought from the bazaar.  The leaves sit there, still as the trunk that bares its weight.  The roses blossom in the last of the light, petruding from the garden.  Roses? You look twice.

The stars that are yet to arrive are protected.  An international aid organisations' tarpaulin sits above you, protending it is protecting you from the stiffling heat that wafts under every breath.  A child, protected by hands, surrounded by an olive branch, stares at you from above.

Was it a dream when I was in a suit on the train, heading to the central business district only two weeks ago?  Or was it a dream when I was in a cafe sipping latte's and eating croissants.  Perhaps this is the dream?

Kyrgyz waking.