One small steppe for man...

Yesterday we went to Berkh. This is the third time I’m writing about Berkh. I don’t exactly know why it always falls prey to being a subject of my blogs, but it does, live with it. I guess the openness of the land speaks to me, as I look out across it there really isn’t much to see. A few scattered herds of animals grazing, some of them choosing to pattern their path so that it intersects with ours, met with a few honks to clear our way. It was strange, as my mind grazed on the horizon I noticed that if I were to look directly to my left or right it all looked brown. Yet as I looked straight ahead I could see, ever so slightly, the first roots of green beginning to layer the soil. The color was foreign and soft, almost elusive, very distinct and yet the longer you looked at it the less of it you could see.
I have been thinking a bit about perspective recently, so it is interesting that this happened to be a very visual demonstration of it. Some analogies or observations that we come up are pretty lame, so I hope this doesn’t fall into that category. Anyway, it seems that when we are in the midst of something it is easy to be dragged down by the circumstances and to not see hope. Yet as I shifted my grazing gaze from the remnants of the death that the winter sweeps over the land, I saw that although very small, life lay ahead. It was a fascinating spot of transition to be in. From one side it seemed as if we were in the desert without promise of an oasis, and on the other, life springing back.

On the more work related side of things…we went to have a meeting with some of the community members there. The idea was to lay out the plans discussed at the beginning of the fiscal year and see how we were going to follow up with activities to meet our goals. The big issues discussed were the building of a deep-water well and construction of a new playground.
The well was actually a hot-topic, everyone was quite involved and it showed in the range of volume used. Let’s continue with another understatement, wells are important. The issues raised were that it is very expensive to dig a well deep enough to tap into a potable source, in fact, beyond the planned budget. However, prices and inflation have been dramatically on the rise here. I was told that land, for example, had doubled in price in only a period of three months. Since coming here, I’ve seen prices in the market increase as well. With this in mind, they were posing the question as to whether it would be more worth it to drill the well now or if they would wait to raise more funds as the cost also increases. There is also the health aspect, how long must they wait to have drinkable water? In addition to that is that unlike most other towns, a majority reside in old Russian apartments rather than gers. The apartments are equipped with centralized water-heating but are disabled because of a lack of water due to debts that the mining company had. The mining company controlled the water system but was losing money so had to cut funds, which led to a very cold winter for a lot of families. These are difficult decisions to make, I admire that WV had to take a hard spot in facilitating the discussion. Better to involve the community and let them know what is going on rather than avoiding the issue.
The playground discussion was a little easier considering that enough funding was available. The government is to provide funding for land, etc and WV the equipment for the kids to play on.
As we were looking at the playground previously installed by WV I couldn’t help but notice shards of broken vodka bottles jutting out of the sand. This is not safe for kids at all. I guess it reminded me of the relevance and need for a project like the one I will be starting. Let’s hope it happens and it is sustainable.
On the way back from Berkh we stopped at Degii’s (driver) mother’s (remember ‘Natasha’?) ger. We had some buuz and tea and I got to see another reminder of the first steps of spring in the bleating of kids (baby goats), calves, and lambs. Also got to see people gathering cashmere from the goats. Cool.