This Past Year

When I wrote the post “Projects to start strong this new year” I intended to follow it up with this post, detailing the successes and failures of those projects. What I didn’t intend was for the year to pass so quickly. With only six months left on my contract (out of 27), it seems my time in Kyrgyzstan will be over before I know it.
As expected, the list of projects I wrote about a year ago did not all come out to fruition, but that’s not to say it wasn’t a successful year (I think that double negative is acceptable given the context. “but it was a successful year” seems a bit too strong…)

1. Help Establish a Microcredit Agency within the NGO Epkin
Well, this one didn’t pan out. Step one of the process was to visit other microcredit agencies and see what we could improve upon to make a new microcredit agency that would better meet the needs of the rural women we serve. As it turns out, there are many (too many, maybe) already existing that can provide for our membership, the main issue they have is getting the word out. We have decided to instead focus our efforts on connecting our women with the right agency for their endeavors. This will be a full project extending through my departure. We are currently applying for a UNDP grant to help us connect lawyers and bankers with our women and youth entrepreneurs.
Also, notice how I just added youth in there in that last sentence? That’s right, we’ve recently expanded from a rural women’s organization to a women and youth org. The org has been trying to delve into working with youth for a while now, but have had difficulty getting youth interested. My counterpart decided since I’m a youth (youth is defined here as between 18 and 30) maybe I would attract them to join, and apparently it worked. Maybe it’s a work in progress.

2. Give Computer Lessons to 6 Villages

Accomplished. This was a success, although a much much much slower success than I expected. While I thought I’d be giving excel classes in the first day of lessons, it turned out I would spend a minimum of 30 minutes starting each lesson with how to click the mouse. Then another 10-20 on moving the cursor.. So it was slow going. But after several months of traveling to each village we’ve accomplished the initial goals of teaching each village activists plus a few others how to open and save documents, create word files, create tables, and print. After that point it was on the village activist to train the rest of the village’s members. More in depth trainings on internet marketing and such will be on an individual basis as needed.

Here is a photo of one of those trainings. Now famous because this photo appears in the Peace Corps Kyrgyzstan brochure!

3. Help Start a School Theater Program in my village of Epkin
This one simply didn’t happen. My secondary counterpart and I created a proposal for the program, but after realizing timing wasn’t right for this year we pretty much scrapped it. My thoughts were that maybe we’d try again earlier this coming year, but it seems my secondary counterpart has moved on to bigger and better things for now.

4. Help Revive Epkin Village’s Library
Not complete. Getting books is not as easy as I thought. Especially Kyrgyz books. I have some leads on used books and will be meeting with the village government to discuss a portion of the surplus budget being proportioned to the library. The counterpart for this is still interested, I am still hopeful for this project’s success before I finish.

5. Help Organize and Run a Leadership/HIV Camp for Rural Youth

Complete. This turned out to be my big project of the year. I got a grant from the Peace Corps for the camp/training. Representatives from multiple village youth committees came to the five-day training in a beautiful village just south of mine, Issyk Ata. Issyk Ata is known for its hot springs and rejuvenation spas, unfortunately I wasn’t able to enjoy those during the training, but some of the participants did. The training happened in mid November, much later than originally planned. Originally we had planned to hold the training during the summer, but the funds were delayed and so we rescheduled for the fall. As the date arrived more than half of the expected participants informed us they could not make it because they needed to work the harvest. Rather than lose half the participants, we changed the date again to mid November.

Here is proof of the training.

More proof.

A fun activity, match the STD/STI to the symptoms.

Presenting their findings.

The training itself was hugely successful. I gave a few of the trainings (in Kyrgyz) as did my counterparts and some HIV/AIDS experts we brought in from Bishkek. We measured the effectiveness of the training through pre- and post-tests and saw a marked improvement from an average of 15/25 questions wrong to just 4/25 wrong. (Is that a negative way of looking at it? Maybe I should say 10/25 correct to 21/25 correct.) Being able to socialize with many Kyrgyz people my age was a special treat. We played Mafia in the evenings and shared magic tricks.
This project includes a follow up portion, as the participants are now required to conduct similar trainings in their villages for the rest of the youth committees (or if the youth committees are small, to the 11^th form students) and report back to me. So far only two of the villages have completed this requirement, but I’ve given them until February 1^st to do it.

OTHER
My English talking club has been somewhat taken over by the three new volunteers in the area. They’ve introduced a recycled art club, a movie club, and I think a business/computer skills club (though I haven’t been to the last one yet despite being a business volunteer.) It’s nice having even more volunteers in the area.
I have also been consulting several aspiring entrepreneurs in my village and the nearby villages that share the local governance. Many people have great ideas for business but access to information is difficult it creates a significant barrier to entry for most of the ideas.

I also had my Dad and brother Brian visit in April and then Patricia visited at the end of the summer. We got to do some traveling around this beautiful country. I’m looking forward to more travel around Kyrgyzstan after I close out my service.

My dad awkwardly shaking my host dad's hand and my host mom.

Brian enjoying his first Marshrutka (minibus) ride.

Patricia and I spent the day at an orphanage making dreams come true..dragons on faces.

Also, this little guy now lives at my house. He brightens even the darkest of days.

2015 PLANS
In addition to the unfinished work I described above and the ongoing projects, I will be spending the next six months preparing my organization for another volunteer. It isn’t a sure thing yet, but there will hopefully be a replacement volunteer for when I leave. I plan on staying a couple extra weeks beyond my first leave date to get the new volunteer up to speed. I will also have to decide on what to do with my future…I am currently applying to graduate school programs for public policy in international development, but will only attend if I can secure a full scholarship. (Like my blog? Have a spare hundred grand? Eh? Nudge nudge) Otherwise it’ll be the real world for me, so job hunting. (Like my blog? Hiring? Preferably in the Chicago area? Eh? Nudge nudge)

That’s enough for now, happy new year!

no strings attached

You Can Have This Money, Just One (Thousand) Condition(s)

You must give it all away.

Despite my best efforts to be lazy, November turned out to be a very productive month. I began the month by taking the GRE in the capital city, a necessary step in applying to graduate schools. Finally welcomed the new group of volunteers to the Oblast. Conducted a week long training for youth committee leaders from several villages on best practices, HIV/AIDS, and other diseases. Worked individually with youth leaders on business plans and project proposals. A string of movie theaters in the capital started offering movies without Russian dubbing, so I enjoyed a cinematic experience for the first time in a while. I was able to celebrate Thanksgiving at the Peace Corps (PC) country director’s house with many PCVs and PC staff. Had my annual review at work, which seemed to go well. And lastly, and what this post will focus on, I worked with my organization on securing funding for the next six months.

Standing with two trainers and a participant from the Youth Committee Training

Funding an NGO is not easy. Funders, when you can find them, prefer to fund projects - not organizations themselves. Of course, in order for the project to work, it needs to be carried out by an organization that can keep its ducks in a row, but funders do not enjoy the idea of contributing to overhead costs. Most grant openings I’ve come across specifically stipulate that exactly none of the grant can be used for overhead costs. I’ll even admit, when I was back in the states and was struck by a feeling of generosity, I’d look up organizations and choose to donate based on how low the percentage of funds used toward overhead were.  The lower the percentage, the higher the likelihood I would donate.

There is this mentality when giving money- we want the money to go toward the project, not into the pockets of those running the project.

I think it’s time we take a second to pause and think about whose pockets those are. The pockets we refuse to pad with our dollars. People like my counterparts, Bubumairam and Guljash. Two women who have dedicated the past two decades to improving the local economy by empowering women through education and access to opportunities. These women were never rich and decided to give back, no. They were not privileged and felt guilty, not that either. These women were victims of a failing system that promoted male chauvinism and cronyism, and decided they were not satisfied by the status quo. They decided to make a change in their own generation, so that future generations would not suffer the same. Slowly, over the past twenty years, these women have been attending any training they can find and afford, acquiring skills they can pass on to other women, building resources for their members, and eking by on limited grant money so that their more than one thousand members can continue to grow in abilities and empowerment.

We don’t want our money going into the pockets of Bubumairam and Guljash…right?

In my opinion? Wrong. Of course I do! Those are exactly the people I want my money going toward. If you’re not comfortable with your money going to Bubumairam and Guljash, then who in the world are you comfortable giving to?

Bubumairam on the right, giving a certificate of completion to Ruskul, a budding activist in a small village nearby my host village.

What does overhead costs mean, anyway? Obvious things like the electric bill for the office, maybe even the water bill (not the case for my organization, since we don’t have a water line to the office), heating, paper, pens, maybe computers and printers, ink cartridges. Less obvious things, like advertisements, auditing, new employee training, application fees for certain certificates. And most importantly: employee wages. If a grant does give in on some overhead costs it will often allow for the first two categories, but almost never will it allow any percentage of the money to go toward employee wages.

Why not?

Why do we not want to pay the people doing good things for the world?

Taking a moral perspective, we are a lousy society to refuse to pay people for doing things that are beneficial to society, like empowering women in the rural areas of Kyrgyzstan, while promoting a system (implicit or not) that allows chief executives of fast food companies and soft drinks to become billionaires.

Taking an economic perspective, we have to ask what will happen when these good people are given a wage. I don’t have statistics to back this up, but I would feel confident in saying paying people like Bubumairam and Guljash would increase the chances of them staying in this line of work. Meaning the people who have taken the time to learn how to empower rural women, will continue to empower rural women. Meaning the people doing good things will be increasingly better at what they do, more qualified and effective.

So, do not buy another bottle of CocaCola, instead give money to an organization that does good, no strings attached.

iPhones in Outhouses

            I don’t live in a yurt in Kyrgyzstan as I know many of you have thought and I certainly hoped for. In fact, no one really lives in yurts all year round. I live in a nice one story house with a cement foundation, mud brick walls plastered with lime stone, and wood floors almost entirely covered by carpets. I sleep on a bed, no box spring or mattress, but it is raised from the ground and I have a comfortable layering of tushuks, a traditional mattress pad. But I do use an outhouse. At night I use my iPhone’s light to find my way to the outhouse.  As my best connection to family, friends, and news far away from here, my iPhone is among my most valued possessions and daily I fear dropping it down the dark hole in the middle of the outhouse floor. What goes down there never comes back out. My fear is compounded every time I hear a story from a local friend or another Peace Corps Volunteer about a recent smart phone falling down into the abyss.

            The other day I was struck by the irony of iPhones at the bottom of outhouses all around Kyrgyzstan. It’s comical, the pinnacle of modernity being rendered useless by something so antiquated. But it’s not antiquated here, the outhouse remains the most common toilet throughout rural Kyrgyzstan. Despite the world around rural Kyrgyzstan rapidly developing in technologies (including plumbing and sewage treatment) not all of these advances are gracing the hills and mountains here. iPhones and, admittedly to a greater degree, other smart phones are found all over Kyrgyzstan. Here, like in the US and elsewhere, you’d be hard pressed to board any public transit vehicle without seeing someone using a smart phone. People play Angry Birds in Kyrgyzstan, they just don’t do it while sitting on the toilet.

            To a more important degree, these contrasts of development and advances are seen in political rights and cultural practices. Ask any Kyrgyzstani about the form of government here and you’d hear a prideful response noting how Kyrgyzstan is the first Central Asian country to have a democratically elected president and parliament. But ask about the rights for the 80,000+ kidnapped brides this year, and you’ll get a more convoluted answer. Like outhouses, bridenapping in Kyrgyzstan has somehow continued in the face of advances surrounding the country. And like the outhouses, the existence of bridenapping is swallowing up any progress made elsewhere.

            For more on bridenapping, I’ve written another post about it, click here to read.

Тынч Means Peace, it also means Quiet

This post has been the hardest for me to write. This is the struggle of the Peace Corps Volunteer. This is the struggle to walk the tight rope of cultural respect and being conscious of human rights violations. This is where the idealistic volunteer, aware of the injustices in the world only to the extent of reading about them in a book, meets the true injustices in the bitter flesh and the tragic truth. I have been advised not to write this post. Americans and Kyrgyzstanis alike have told me this fight is useless and I am a fool if I think otherwise.

Read on to hear the struggle of this fool.

Тынч is the Kyrgyz word for peace. It also means quiet. I am a fan of peace, but in this instant I cannot be quiet. Too many hearts are screaming inside bodies with mouths sewn closed. You may not hear the noise, but quiet it is not.

As a Peace Corps Volunteer, I am here with three specific goals set by the US Government. 1. To transfer skills. 2. To share US culture with members of my host community. 3. To share my host community’s culture with the US. This post is none of these three. You may think, oh hey, it’s the third one. No. It is not. I am not discussing Kyrgyzstan’s culture. I will be discussing a practice that should be ended; it is not and should not be part of the culture.

Earlier this year a 12 year-old girl committed suicide down the street from my house. It was the second child suicide in the village since my arrival. I wrote a blog post about it, but before I could do an edit another tragedy struck the village. A girl from this village was bride kidnapped and during the getaway the bride kidnapper crashed the car, killing the girl. The bride kidnapper survived, he was not charged for anything, and the consensus was that he should have been driving more carefully.

Bride kidnapping is illegal, but quite possibly the least observed law in all of the country. Either due to a terribly misguided understanding of historic Kyrgyz culture, or a surprisingly effective attempt at promoting male chauvinism, bride kidnapping has become so prevalent in Kyrgyz culture most estimates say between 50-70% of marriages among the ethnically Kyrgyz are by bride kidnapping. There are two types of bride kidnapping, consensual and non-consensual. This post is specifically discussing non-consensual bride kidnapping.

Here is my struggle. Bride kidnapping is without a doubt the most harmful practice in Kyrgyzstan to everyone in the country, yet few realize the extent of its harm. People believe it is a central and positive aspect of the Kyrgyz culture, so criticizing the practice is considered criticizing Kyrgyz culture. A Kyrgyz person speaking out against it runs the risk of being ostracized.

Why is bride kidnapping so harmful? Is it really much worse than arranged marriages? Isn’t it just a different cultural understanding? If you are asking these questions or similar ones, please continue reading and if by the end you are not convinced, let me know.

For those of you who really know me, you know the death of a 12 year-old girl is not one I can just let go of. Similarly, the preventable death of any youth is not just sad to me, but a terrible tragedy and failing of society. Those who have died are not the only ones suffering from bride kidnapping, the bride kidnapped women, the men involved, the children, the families, even the economy and the future generations all suffer. Bride kidnapping is not a localized issue and it is not a short-term problem. 

Women: Non-consensually bride kidnapped women are raped. Over and over. And this is considered acceptable. It often interrupts or altogether stops their university education. Economic opportunities are cut down to none or negligible. These women are no longer treated as humans, but instead as property.

Men: It may seem irrational, but men suffer from bride kidnapping as well. They are forced to treat women as less than human and suffer from the psychological issues connected with that. Bride kidnapping destroys the potential for men to have a respectful relationship with their spouses. The practice of bride kidnapping often means men are marrying before they are ready.

Children: In poorer rural areas, girls are brought up to expect to one day be bride kidnapped, at a young age girls begin to accept their future lives at home tending to domestic chores. When this is the only prospect presented to the girls, there is little drive to pursue education. For those girls who do pursue their education and make it to university, a bride kidnapping during their studies means they are never to return. The Kyrgyz say that the girls can return to university, but it is incredibly rare since most families require the new bride remain at home for two years before going back to her parents or university. By this time they have children to raise and feed, meaning time and money are no longer available for university. Boys are taught they will be handed everything in life, even a wife. Why work hard for anything if it will be given to you? Especially school?

Family: It is customary for the youngest son to live in his parents’ house with his parents and family. Often the bride kidnapped wife of the youngest son is physically and verbally abused by her mother-in-law. This results in permanent animosity within the household and pent up anger within the bride kidnapped wife.

Economy: Kidnapped brides are commonly forced to remain in the house for the first two years and there after are expected to take care of the household chores and child rearing. This means for many, they cannot work or start businesses, meaning fewer laborers and fewer businesses. My organization works to help these women start businesses, but given the constraints we can only help women start businesses they can conduct from within the home. With such a large percentage of the population out of the workforce, the economy is doomed. Not only are they out of the workforce, but women also happen to be the higher savers. Statistically women save much more than men around the world, the cost this has to the Kyrgyzstani savings rate is significant. A male dominated workforce also means more corruption and cronyism, a cost itself to the economy and an indirect cost by being a disincentive for potential foreign investment.

Future Generations: With bride kidnapping, women do not control the family finances. When women do control the family finances higher percentages of income go toward the children’s nutrition, school supplies, academics, and healthcare. Women also tend to favor sons to a lesser degree than men do, resulting in better health and education for daughters. Stunted growth among children in Kyrgyzstan is extremely high, especially among girls. Studies show, were women to have jobs or businesses and control the family finances, stunting would all but be erased in Kyrgyzstan.

Certainly, bride kidnapping is not the single factor holding Kyrgyzstan back from blooming as a successful country, you don’t need a degree in economics to see that. My point however, is that it does have an impact on far more areas than meet the eye. Were it to end, Kyrgyzstan would see improvements in all aspects of life. I’m here to develop Kyrgyzstan on a micro level, so I will focus on this problem at a micro level, but in reality only a micro change can be expected from that. Maybe someone interested in developing Kyrgyzstan will pick up on this at a higher level, кудай буйруса (God willing).

Maybe it’ll be a human rights activist, if so, here is some fuel to get started:

·      Bride kidnapping is clearly saying that women do not have the right to their own life, liberty, or security of person.

·      Bride kidnapping is, essentially, slavery.

·      Bride kidnapped brides are categorically subjected to rape, physical abuse, and verbal assault.

·      Often marriages from bride kidnappings are never officially registered as marriages, meaning brides do not have rights of inheritance should their husbands die, or alimony should their husbands desert them.

·      Local police routinely refuse bride kidnapped brides recognition when they attempt to file a complaint.

·      The marriage is not consensual and studies show 18% of these marriages are with a bride under 18 years old.

·      Bride kidnapping interferes with education, both before and after the act.

Kyrgyzstan wants peace. Like all places on earth, Kyrgyzstan deserves peace. But things must get loud. Feelings must be verbalized, voices must be heard, and change, true change, must occur before Kyrgyzstan can be quiet.