In fact we’ve been here for six weeks already but everything still feels so new that writing anything substantial about the country feels premature. There is one fact however that we can state with confidence: It is cold.

Apparently the weather turned cold on the weekend we arrived, and it hasn’t looked back since. The temperatures are reaching -20C at night and the streets are layered with sheer ice that occasionally gets topped up by fresh snow. The kids polish long slicks of black ice on the pavements and then queue up to run and slide. This is great fun to watch in the daylight but considerably less fun when hurrying home in the dark. There are other dangers lurking in the night; many of the iron manhole covers are missing as people sell them for scrap. The streets are generally not lit so walking around is a mindful exercise.

We have now moved to our permanent home, a small solid house with a garden. I say ‘solid’ as it was built in the 1940’s with German influence, so has huge thick walls that keep us warm (my local colleagues consider it hopelessly old-fashioned). What also keeps us warm is the heating system, piped in from some furnace deep in the city, that we can’t adjust one bit. As back home in Finland, heating is on 24/7 over the winter and this is generally a very good thing. Only it sometimes gets so hot inside that we have to suffer the guilt and open the windows… Through the open window we often hear extremely loud miaowing from the back of the house and have got to know the local cat population relatively well. The hot water pipes cross the garden, not altogether elegantly, and create a winter retreat for five stray cats that come and sleep on the warm lagging.

Not everyone is keeping warm though. The central heating systems were often left to collapse in the 1990’s with no funds for maintenance. The raises in global energy prices have had a direct impact on the poorest households in Kyrgyzstan and the rest of Central Asia. Kyrgyzstan imports most of its gas from Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan but the prices have increased by 150% over the past year and some families simply have to turn off the heating. In neighbouring Tajikistan the situation is even worse as they are dependent on foreign electricity as well, and this winter many rural areas are only getting one or two hours of electricity per day. This is bad enough when you can’t switch on the lights or listen to the radio, but when it’s -20c, there’s no power and you can’t afford the gas then the problem becomes more stark. The poorest families are now burning wood, coal or even old tyres to get through the winter – a disaster for the environment of course but, as they say in the Balkans, what to do? Central Asia really is unique. There is nowhere else in the world where 80% of people over 60 live on less than $1 a day and have to fight starvation as well as such extreme cold for at least a quarter of the year. Yet when people talk about global poverty, the low-income countries in Central Asia rarely make it onto the agenda.

We are learning more of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan and the region day by day. This is mainly through the people we meet and friends we are starting to make. We never had, or needed, a local social network in Slovenia but being a bit further from home it feels important to have friends. Because of my previous work, I already had some contacts and even people that I knew here, so it has been easy to link up and meet people. There is only one other Finn in Kyrgyzstan, so we obviously meet frequently! Tim & I are starting our Russian lessons tomorrow, which should help hugely in being able to communicate with the community around us. I have been buying enormous quantities of vegetables as can’t say how many pieces of beetroot/carrots I want, but can say kilogram (‘kilogram’ – it’s easy!) Tim on the other hand has a head-start as he has been studying Russian grammar from a book that his dad used when learning the language in the 60s, and he is full of sentences like “My brother is a scientist” and “Is there an engineer on this kolkhoz, Comrade?”