aje: village distribution #1

You may remember that we (along with the rest of our team) recently sent out an appeal for aid for hospitals and the poor after this difficult winter. The response was so great that we have had to find more and more ways to use the funds in the most appropriate ways possible. As you saw a couple of posts ago, we already have given to two hospitals, and have a few more on the list. We are also undertaking food distributions with the help of a local organization that has lists of some of the neediest people here. This week we delivered a food package to 72 people in a village north of our city, most of them the elderly living on meager pensions who have no one to take care of them. This was the first distribution of several, and we expect the number of recipients will grow significantly in future distributions.

1400 lbs of food takes some effort to purchase, package, and distribute.

First we had to go shopping:

Then volunteers divided the food into 72 packages. Here is the contents of one package (2 kg flour, 2 kg rice, 1 kg sugar, 1 kg pasta, 1 kg buckwheat, 1 liter oil, two cans of beef, 1 packet of bullion, 2 candles):

Then we had to transport everything up to this village an hour north of town (the bags you see here are only a portion of what we took up in three cars):

This was a very unique village. We are told that it was built by the Soviets, who relocated people here to work the Uranium mines. So while in most villages, people live in simple houses with large gardens, people here live in Soviet blocks like this in the middle of nowhere:

We split into groups and completed the distribution in about half a day. As I mentioned, the recipients were almost entirely elderly, mostly Russian, and many were widows. Central Asian culture places very high value on taking care of your parents in their old age, so if a woman has no one to take care of her in her old age, it is usually because either she either did not have boys, or because they died, or because she is from a minority group (like Russian) where there is not such an emphasis on taking care of your parents. Here is one happy recipient.

Afterwards we went out to visit the old Uranium mine, which is a lake now. I found that the water wasn't quite as glow-in-the-dark as they said it would be.