I am caught this week spending my time with some very important people from very different areas. Over the weekend, the bigwigs from Bishkek and Washington came in to pay little ol’ Naryn a sunny visit.
Last Saturday night was defined by a fancy dinner involving two people from Washington: the Regional Direction for Eurasia, and a nice man who holds the fairly vague position of “Desk Officer” for our part of the world. The dinner was rounded out by our Country Director, in from Bishkek. We treated them to the local dinnertime hot spot, and they got to know the delightful local custom of employing an off-key karaoke DJ to spice-up the loud, Friday night music.
Then, along with the rising Sunday morning sun, this esteemed crew hopped from one volunteer to the next, viewing our living conditions and working environments. When they got to my house, my family, as always, charmed them to pieces. We had a wonderful breakfast, and my home-stay dad even had the decency to lie on my behalf.
“Yes,” he said, with a wink in my direction, “Carl stays up very late working, and then, like a strong farmer, he rises every morning with the sun.”
But the brass, as always, had a lot to see, and very little time to see it. One minute they were jumping happily around Naryn, and the next they were off to the beautiful Lake Issyk Kul.
In their stead came in the folks from the venerable Kyrgyzstan – New Zealand Rural Fund. For those of you who remember, these are the professional development practitioners who let me tag along with them a bit last year, when I was as green as green could be. This year, they’ve extended me the same courtesy.
The two men I’ve been hanging around with this week are veterans of this kind of exactly the kind of work I’d like to make a career of. They talk about development, about micro-finance, about “giving a hand up, not a hand out.” Finally, with the experience to understand what is going on, they are letting me see what the nuts and bolts of well funded, grass roots development work really entails.
Each day we go to a village where they have, through local staff, organized small scale development programs. Most of these are groups of 5 to 8 people, all nominally organized to accomplish a particular goal. One group might be trying to maximize growing efforts in a new green house; another with goat breeding; another with improved varieties of potatoes. But this is just one portion of the goal. Within each group, members pool a small amount of money each month, and then draw on this money for internal micro-loans. To make sure all of this works well, these Kiwis don’t miss a beat.
I sit and watch as, through a translator, these guys ask the groups how much every individual element of a project costs, from inputs to labor, and the opportunity cost of it all. Afterwards, we have long discussions on the development philosophy behind everything, and how best to help the poorest people in each village. The opportunity is simply profound.
And folks, if all this excitement weren’t enough, from this letter onwards, I will be participating in a 24-hour blogapalooza. That means, once per hour, every hour, for the next day, I will be making a post to my blog. That’s right. For anyone who really wants to know what a day in the life of Kyrgy Carl is like, now is your chance.
