Back from the South

I flew from Bishkek (in the North—look at the map on this site) to Osh (in the South) on December 24^th. I went down there with Tynara, my colleague from AUCA, and Mirlan, one of my research assistants. The plan was to stay in Osh for three or four days to collect about 6 interviews, then down to Isfana, if the very southernmost corner of Batken province in between Uzbekistan and Tajikstan for another 7-8 interviews, and then north to Jalalabad, the third southern province, for another 7-8 interviews.

It didn’t really work out that way. Osh was great. I had a wonderful contact down there who helped me find people to interview. I took about 9 interviews. I interviewed more people than I originally planned because we got a huge snowstorm the day after Christmas (western Christmas, that is, the Russian Orthodox church celebrates Christmas on January 7^th). There are two roads into Batken province. The better of the two roads goes through Uzbekistan, and I don’t have an Uzbek visa, so that wasn’t an option. The other road is basically a dirt road, and the prospect of driving that in the snow was unappealing. Not to mention dangerous. It’s not that it would be incredibly slippery—that’s the road through Uzbekistan. It would just be very likely that we would get bogged down in rocks and mud.

I decided it wasn’t worth the risk. My contact in Osh was kind enough to inform me about a couple people from Batken province who had come up for a meeting, and I was able to interview two of them. That means I only have three interviews from Batken. That’s unfortunate. But not the end of the world. In the end, it’s my surveys that really absolutely need to be distributed in certain geographic areas, although I really would have like to have seen Batken province. Maybe I’ll go down again once the weather clears, just to see it. It would be too late in my research schedule to do more interviews.

So we stayed to extra days in osh to allow the roads to clear up and to regroup. I actually go a few really good interviews during that time, so I’m glad I stayed. We then went up to Jalalabad and got another 9 interviews. That was to make up for the lost interviews in Batken—I’m already going to have more interviews from the north than from the south, and I didn’t want the difference to be too drastic.

We flew home on New Year’s eve. It’s very cold.