Getting to Know Your International Contacts—Part 1

 “Over 600 million children world-wide live in absolute poverty - an estimated 1 in 4. In many countries, rates are much higher with over 60 percent of children living in households with incomes below international poverty lines. Over 10 million children under five still die every year from preventable diseases - the vast majority of them in developing countries. As one of the most powerless groups in society, children often bear the physical and emotional costs of poverty”. Childhood Poverty Research and Policy Center.  The Childhood Poverty Research and Policy Centre is a collaborative research and policy program which includes Save the Children, the Chronic Poverty Research Centre (CPRC) and partners in China, India, Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia.

I choose Kyrgyzstan as my choice of country to learn more about. Until 1991 Kyrgyzstan is a part of Soviet Russia. In 1991 they became an independent nation. Just as most of the countries in the world, they had to go through the shock of becoming an independent nation and facing the changes it brings. One huge change was having the ownership of land, livestock, services or anything that was owned by the state during the communist era. Widespread privatization and open economy created a different atmosphere in the country. Approximately sixty percent of the population is living on agriculture. Mining was also a huge part of the economy before the independence. It is being partially abandoned currently.

 According to the childhood poverty article, fifty-five percent of children in Kyrgyzstan are living in poverty in rural and urban areas (Yarkova et al, 2004). Childhood poverty is inseparable from the poverty of families and communities. Our findings, which are consistent with the findings of other research (e.g. World Bank, 2003) suggest that the most important factors underlying childhood poverty in Kyrgyzstan are living in a single-parent household and being a member of a young nuclear family where the parents are younger than 30 years of age.

 With these financial situations come the hardships of daily lives. Most of the families have children  skipping school to work in fields or mines. Most of the mines are constructed amateurishly and they are very dangerous to work in. The tunnels are only wide enough for the children to go in and bring the coal sacks out on their backs. The number of street children living in urban area has also risen. There are other survival and coping mechanisms created by individual families as well. Reducing the amount of food eaten, not buying meal products, reducing the heating of homes in winter time, cutting down wood or use of coal for cooking and heating, leaving the rural area to urban areas looking for work, visiting traditional healers due to lack of health care or un affordability of health care are some of them.

Childhood poverty Research and policy is paying special attention to issues regarding the poverty in Kyrgyzstan.

The research in Kyrgyzstan explored the following key issues:

• How poverty affects children and young people in Kyrgyzstan.
• The key reasons why so many children live in poverty.
• How key livelihood or coping strategies affect child wellbeing and their immediate and possible long-term effects.
• How childhood poverty and children's future life chance vary among different parts of the country and social groups.
• Evidence that intergenerational poverty cycles are taking place or developing and which groups of children are particularly at risk.
• Role of social and economic policies in causing and helping to tackle childhood poverty.

I am a person born and raised in a developing country. Some of these issues are not new, such as children in poverty working in the family fields, working in bazaar after school, sometimes cutting down on food. But, the information on changes after the independence and its effects on children and families are hard to believe. It is also unbelievable to read how young children are becoming the breadwinners of their families. How the children have their dreams and worries regarding their unknown future is hard to read.

As I was reading more articles on Kyrgyzstan following ones took my attention than the others. I hope these websites and articles will be helpful to everyone.

Children of Kyrgyzstan. By David Levene, April 2006

http://www.guardian.co.uk/flash/page/0,,1756789,00.html

“At the end of March, with help from the British-based charity EveryChild, I travelled to the central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan to work with street children in the cities of Bishkek and Osh. Kyrgyzstan inherited one of the least effective economies of the former Soviet Union and its transition to a market economy has been extremely tough. Now the republic is struggling to achieve economic stability. Sadly, poverty is on the increase and the level of services available to people is generally very poor”.  There is a slide show done by David Levene available in this article as well.

Child labor in Kyrgyz coal mines. By Natalia Antelava, BBC Central Asia correspondent 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6955202.stm

“Like many of its neighbors, Kyrgyzstan never recovered from the collapse of the Soviet Union, which destroyed, among other things, the country's once-thriving mining industry. The coal mines were abandoned, and the infrastructure left lying in ruins.
After years of watching the government fail to revive the economy, people turned to excavating coal themselves. But the mines they dug out were often too narrow for adults, and so fathers began bringing in their sons. No one knows the exact number of children working in Kyrgyzstan's coal mines. Locals say the government refuses to acknowledge the problem. Officially these children may not even exist. Yet we saw them at every coal mine we visited. They work all year round, under the blistering heat of the summer and in the freezing temperatures of the harsh mountain winter”.

Counseling eases the pain for troubled children in Kyrgyzstan by Galina Solodunova
http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/kyrgyzstan_34989.html

“For 30 years, Dr. Ageeva has dedicated her career to helping children and adolescents overcome issues of drug and alcohol dependence, violence and sexual abuse. She serves as faculty chair of the psychology department at the prestigious Kyrgyz-Russian Slavonic University. Dr. Ageeva approached UNICEF with a very specific goal in mind: to develop a partnership for an education and skills program on the treatment of traumatized youth and troubled families. UNICEF agreed to the proposal and a summer workshop was planned to kick off the program”.

Reference:

• http://www.childhoodpoverty.org/index.php/action=documentfeed/doctype=pdf/id=98/

• http://www.guardian.co.uk/flash/page/0,,1756789,00.html
• http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/kyrgyzstan_34989.html
• http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6955202.stm