Osh

As some of you may or may not know, I traveled to the historic city of Osh this past week. Osh is often called by Kyrgyz as the "capitol of the South" and rightly so. It is truly a different country on the other side of the Tian Shan Mountains. There is no other way to describe it.

Why did I go? Well, if you ask anyone who works for Peace Corps or pays Federal Income Tax, I went in order to develop capacity in local nationals that I could not deliver in my original site. That, and they have this really cool statue of Lenin. The intended purpose was to give a series of seminars on business and NGO management to interested parties in the Osh region. We soon discovered, however, that nobody was interested. What can I say? We tried.

The first day was short and included a tour of Osh Technical University, a couple of classes, and a leadership roundtable seminar. Our second day included a small gathering of volunteers and their counterparts (host organization's "buddy" for the volunteer). Outside of the organizers of the event, only two volunteers and one counterpart showed up. I got to talk about my organization for a while and a few of us brainstormed on different ways to be more effective volunteers, but really no Host Country Nationals were helped in the process. The third day was supposed to center on the three visiting volunteers (Martin on the left, me in the middle, and Virginia on the right) giving extended seminars on various topics. Mine was entitled, "Using the 5 Basic Goals of Every Organization to Improve Cash Generation." Again, nobody showed up. Maybe somebody leaked the name of my lecture...

The rest of my time was spent sight seeing and meeting the volunteers in the southern region that I will probably never see again. All in all, I had a wonderful experience that was worth the 10 hour care ride with my Program Manager. Believe me, the whole ride was not this beautiful, but it did have its moments.