Transforming 8 Communities in the Pamirs

Work has begun in earnest over the last three months. Continued support of community initiatives has yielded much fruit - literally, in some cases.

Health Project

The health project continues to train and equip health workers to spread knowledge of good hygiene practices as part of their preventative approach to childhood illness. Here is one story from Madina:

Dilafruz has 3-children the youngest is her son who is studying in the secondary school in the 2nd grade. Once he came to the medpoint to see his mother’s lessons and he found it very interesting. After each lesson he asked his mother what she has been learning.

Dilafruz always shared information with her family. After one of the lessons about worms she explained to him about of types of worms and the ways of spreading them and showed him the pictures which she was drawing during the lesson to her notebook. Her son liked the information and started to draw some types of worms to his notebook too. Later he showed pictures to his friends at school. He explained how the worms can spread from one person to other. Before he had a habit of not to cut the nails and to wash the hands. Now Dilafruz hasn’t problem with cutting his nails and washing his hands with soap. He does this just by himself and reminds others to wash their hands.

As well as carrying out 28 lessons and activities with groups of women and health workers, the team have also assisted the health workers in carrying out educational celebration days in schools. World Children’s Day was on the 1^st June and we enabled over 160 children in five locations to take part – many for the first time.

High Altitude Agriculture

It has been a busy time for the greenhouse project too:

• Budget training is essential part for project partners. Calculating and understanding the general daily costs makes life easier for farmers. The first part of training was about how to create a budget (family budget, business budget and personal budget). On second session illustrated the basic financial knowledge and yearly expenses of green house. Creating a budget assisted each farmer to be aware of all of the expenditures (monthly, half year, yearly) and assisted in the prediction of their financial situation for betterment of life quality. 
• Canning training was improving skills of farmers. Getting knowledge in such a training with the experienced trainer improves confidence for preservation and also gives our partners’ communities experience/knowledge.
• We have also assisted in the moving of one of the greenhouses to a better location in the village to improve productivity for next year. Natural disasters like rockfalls brought challenges for the greenhouse at the school in the first years.
• We helped procure supplies for the construction of greenhouse at the furthest village of Shokhdara valley: Javshangoz village. We hope our new design will bring an opportunity for local farmers at an affordable price. The project started working at this village with the aim to improve nutrition and create the opportunity to grow vegetables which are impossible to grow outside.
• We are always trying to improve at Operation Mercy.  With a short-term volunteer, we were able to conduct interviews with our partners to improve our project.  We have asked both private and community partners and through his research, we will glean new information to develop ourselves and partners.