The Selfless Nomad: 27 Months in Kyrgyzstan: What In The World Have I Been Doing?

During the past three and a half months I’ve been doing more than moping around over my broken computer. For example I’ve been skiing, learning how to stay warm, celebrating American holidays, and learning how to properly walk on ice! In reality I’ve been doing “a lot!”

Mama Cow

The Issyk-Kul crew celebrating Turkey day - photo cred. to Becca

Back in early October we began working on some hand washing lessons. We are done with putting those on for now but they were a lot of fun. We were able to reach about 250 students between two schools. It is hard to assess the impact of these lessons, but I know they don’t hurt. One day when my brother’s friend was over at our house he told me that when his young daughter came home from school she was counting bir, eke, ooch, turt, besh (1,2,3,4,5) and showing him how to wash his hands! I’ll consider that one very small success. We tend not to think twice about washing our hands in America after the bathroom, before eating, after touching animals etc. However it is much more challenging here, this can be shown by the incredibly high rates of Hep. A in my village and other diseases. In winter time the rates for all of these diseases skyrocket. I don’t know the reason why but I can speculate that for one it is cold. The cold itself isn’t making people sick, but keeps people from taking preventive measures. One example is washing hands. Washing hands with cold water, when it is cold sucks, I know! I also know at my house we do not have running water, and for quite sometime our sink was outside and every morning the water in it would be frozen solid rendering it useless. I had hand sanitizer, so I used that instead but I know my family doesn’t have hand sanitizer so I try not to think about what they did after using the restroom. Our sink is now inside thankfully. One other major problem is a lack of resources and sometimes laziness. Our village school has 650 students and only 4 sinks, see the picture for what I mean by sink, and they sometimes have water and I have never seen them have soap. Soap is cheap, soap is readily available, but they don’t have it. So if a student uses the restroom all they have to clean their hands with is cold water… No wonder we have a Hep. A rate in our village that was more than 4 times higher the rate in the rest of my region in 2012 and an average age of 9. This is an area and a topic I look forward to doing more with, potentially a running water project, along with getting our school director to take the initiative to at least make sure the school has soap!!! This will be a challenge, because she will gain no benefit from it, and they will make the excuse that the students are bad and the soap will disappear. It is engrained in their culture to not take the blame and responsibility for things; they even have a verb tense that aids that!

2 of our 4 sinks no soap :(

Hand Washing is Fun!

Along with trying to get the students to wash their hands I’ve been working on some data collection. I’ve been in the process of doing a need assessment and giving a basic health questionnaire with topics relevant to Kg. We were able to get about 1.6% of our population to complete the survey giving us a pretty decent sample size. This was half of my original goal but do to time constraints, and lost surveys that was all I was able to achieve. I was amazed at how lazy or indifferent a small portion of the population was when it came to filling out the survey. The survey had 5 questions, the first asks to identify what you believe are the 4 biggest health problems in our village are, the second asks for the 4 best things in our village, the third asks what you would do to improve the school, the fourth asks what you would do to improve the hospital, and the last asks the same about the village. I quickly learned I could not give more than one survey out at a time because people would simply copy each other’s answers or talk together and decide on the same answers. This is normal practice in schools even on tests so I get where it is coming from. All the English teacher volunteers hate this and struggle with it. I would even ask them to do it themselves because we need to know what individuals think, but no hope. I am just about done with translating the results and will post them here once done! We just began administering the health test, much behind schedule after waiting almost 2 months to get the translations back from our staff. I am very excited to get all the results back, and begin planning lessons and knowing what areas to focus my time on. I don’t mean to sound negative or disappointed about the time it has taken or the results we have received, but instead want to share that working in a very different culture and trying to get things done on a schedule is very challenging for a large number of reasons. Patience, I thought I had it, I was wrong, but I am learning more and more everyday.

The Carrot, the Rabbit, and the Farmer at the Fall festival

Veg art

Those are my main things to show in 3 months, but we’ve been doing much more. I’ve attended 3 conferences, one on HIV/AIDS, one on healthy families and we are beginning a woman’s club in two weeks, and one on grant writing and project design. I also do twice weekly English lessons with a group at the school and they are wonderful. In exchange for my English teaching, I’m not very good at it. I have them help me with my health projects, giving surveys, administering tests and more. Along with work, I’ve also been playing. We have the nicest ski resort in Kg about 3 hours from my village so I’ve been there a few times, it’s not the best, but for Kg. it is amazing! Also about a third of the price as it would cost to go in America. Work is picking up, we are in the process of planning a summer health camp, I’m helping out with a winter sports camp in a few weeks, and we are getting ready for new volunteers in April.