photo by brian harrington spier

(...) It is becoming almost routine for Amina to let her children stay off school. It is around minus 20 on a January morning, and her elder son Intizor has been off sick with a cold for the last week. Today she has decided to keep Intizor’s younger brother Sino and sister Sitora at home as well.

“They go from a cold apartment to a cold school, so they get ill. It’s better if they stay at home wrapped in warm blankets,” said Amina, who has five children in all and lives in a multi-storey apartment block in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan.

Dushanbe, like the rest of the country, has been hit by massive power cuts caused by a combination of exceptionally cold weather, a dip in the electricity supply to the grid, and a legacy of underinvestment in the power industry.

In the capital, the electricity at least still comes on for a few hours a day, but Amina has no way of keeping the flat warm, and nothing to cook on (..)

writes iwpr. after one week of facing what they reported as beeing the worst winter ever, we europeans are happy to have escaped. back in paris now. but what should the locals do? and why is this government not able to provide any useful services to its people?