July 3, 2012
Yesterday was my 70th
Birthday. The movement through the decades seems swifter on this side
of the 5th one than it did during the first four of my
life. It is interesting to be in a foreign country, far from some
friends of 40 or more years standing, and from younger people whose
lives have touched mine in the past 15 to 20 years. They are who I
would normally try to gather for a celebration of food, drink, and
music to mark such an occasion. But this is actually the 5th
year I have marked my birthday in Kyrgyzstan.
In 2008, my young Kyrgyz friend Emil
and I climbed aboard a British Airlines jumbo in Houston on my
birthday and flew to London. After nine and a quarter hours we were
in London, on the third of July. Four hours later we boarded a
British Midlands International (BMI) flight to Bishkek. And we
landed here on the early morning of the Fourth of July. I watched the
sun come up and had some breakfast with Emil's family and then went
down for a nap. A little later our adventure began. I was always a
little off balance. I learned how to say yes and no in Kyrgyz. I
learned how to say “Min atim Calvin. Sin atim?” to learn
an other's name. I learned to say “Raxmat,” to thank people. To
say “Salam Aliekum” or “Salamatsysby,” as hello. And then
discovered that I needed Russian to do business in Bishkek.
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| A Bishkek Mini-Bazaar below street level |
But we soon were traveling to the
countryside and I began to fall in love with the place, the people,
and the culture of hospitality that marks this remarkable country.
Every direction that your eyes turn the mountains are there
encircling the places where people have carved out villages and
cities. Five million people call it home, about one million live in
the capital city of Bishkek, where I am located. At any given time
about one million are also out of the country working as migrant
laborers in Russia, Kazakhstan, or places like America.
I came here to stay when we created
Fund Orozbay after a long visit in the summer of 2009. It took almost
a year. There was a revolution that deposed the then president Bakiev
in April of 2010, then in June there was an inter-ethnic problem that
caused lots of problems in the South of the country around Osh and
Jalalabad. I finally was able to come to start work with the fund in
September. By October we managed to sign all the documents and get
registered as a public charity fund.
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| Dried apricots at Osh Bazaar |
Since then we have been learning more
about the place, teaching a little English to earn funds for the
charity, traveling around, writing some feature stories for local
publications, and supporting efforts to improve education, efforts to
solve the challenges of being a burgeoning democracy through
voluntary action, and providing some direct aid to those who are
homeless, or who are elderly and poor.
We now are moving forward on a project
that we envisioned originally in 2009. It is a pilot that will
provide funds to the villages in the area of Kulatov in the Nu-kaat
region of the province of Osh to improve educational performance by
students and teachers. As usual we are starting small, providing $100
per month during the school year for the project to award prizes to
deserving students and teachers. Decisions about how the funds will
be distributed will be handled by our representative in the area who
was a teacher and supervisor of schools for 45 years.
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| Near Kulatov |
We are actively raising funds at Help
Fund Orozbay in Kyrgyzstan where you can make a donation on-line
safely through PayPal. I need your help to do the work we have to do
here. The country will celebrate its 21st Independence Day
this August. We are hoping to raise $1000 dollars before then to help
implement our projects.
Please consider and then make a
donation of $10, $25, $50 or whatever you can afford to help us reach
our goal.
In addition to the Kulatov project we
have these other activities underway:
- A project that will translate Kyrgyz Folk Tales into English for use in English classes. We will provide teachers with downloadable pdf documents that they can use in their classrooms. The Folk Tale project helps to preserve Kyrgyz Folk Tales and to help communicate the values of the culture. Using indigineous materials in translation will be a continuing project.
- Continuing support for the American Studies Association of Kyrgyzstan's Annual Symposium. We have provided scholarship funding to pay for students and teachers who can not afford the registration fee and we are providing some consulting services about the use of social media to advance the groups agenda of improving the quality of teaching about American Studies and the teaching of English in the country.
- We are continuing our support of and consultation with individuals and groups on voluntary action as a solution to the challenges facing this small country. The government cannot do everything to address the issues of homelessness, orphans and widows. People in Kyrgyzstan are beginning to understand the need for creating voluntary action groups, not just to protest, but to offer solutions to these challenges. Fund Orozbay offers small grants to such groups and consulting services on local fundraising and the use of marketing and social networks to raise awareness.
- We are also working on English as a Foreign Language resources that will provide English teachers throughout the country with free lessons and lesson plans in English, Russian, and Kyrgyz for use with their students. The first of these lessons will be available in August from our website. We will use various means of communications to let teachers know about their availability.
I am teaching three times a week for an
NGO that offers EFL classes where I get to test the new learning,
teaching materials. I began my first class there on my 70th
birthday as a way to improve my productivity in this new decade.
I sincerely hope you will join with me
in this endeavor. Click this link and donate the cost of lunch for
two, that small amount can do a wonder of good here.
