Monday 6 October

Today was our first day as it were in “the field”. Our meeting is at the UNICEF offices in the centre of Bishkek.

We get a briefing on what UNICEF is dealing with here. The population of Bishkek is 800,000 officially, but unofficially at least a couple of hundred thousand more; more than a million possibly. There are problems of migrant children, migrant families coming into Bishkek looking for employment. The country has huge economic problems. It has little of its own resources to trade in. Also, HIV/AIDS through substance abuse is a growing problem. Not of catastrophic proportions yet, but a problem for young people who are, as it were, loose, coming from broken homes, or are supporting their families themselves on very small subsistence wages.

The Centre for the Protection of Children (CPC) at Osh Bazaar. This centre reminded me of some of the centres I’d been to in Romania. It is our first real contact with the problems UNICEF is trying to tackle as part of its End Child Exploitation campaign. The Centre’'s mission is “to foster the rehabilitation and reunification of children with their families”.

The children at the CPC project seemed very happy, open, tactile, excited to have a group of strangers with cameras and funny gear arriving. The centre has developed a wide range of projects: family reunification, social counselling, encouraging personal hygiene, providing nutritious food. CPC staff have trained the children to talk to other children in the markets, in the street, about HIV/AIDS and drug awareness. The centre has helped the children set up a fund where part of the children’s earnings are saved, and can be allocated and used for whatever purpose the children collectively decide, which I thought was extraordinary. For example, if one child is lacking in any way (it could be clothes, need for medical care, etc.) the children can get together and decide to allocate a proportion of their funds to that particular child.

CPC has set up a feeding centre for street children working at Osh Bazaar, one of the main bazaars in Bishkek.

After grabbing a banana for lunch, we head for the Centre for Media Studies, another UNICEF-supported project. We were shown a short film made by one of the boys there about a street boy called Andrey. They had taken an interest in him, taken him under their wing and started to film his life on the street. This is a tough, canny young boy we’re talking about. His father was drunk, had beaten up the mother, destroyed the home. Andrey had run away and was living the wild migrant gypsy existence on the streets. Eventually, the young people from the centre took Andrey back to his mother. And this woman, confronted with her son, was clearly wounded and bereft, and at a loss as to how to take care of him. She let him go to an orphanage rather than taking him back. Now he’s back on the street. This short film showed us the kind of life a number of children must be living.