Avalanches in J-Bad

1815 10 March 2009

While our PDM has been very useful for me so far, some unfortunate circumstances have caused about 25% of our group to not be able to make it. The Southern Kyrgyzstan volunteers have the option of flying to Bishkek or taking the 10-12 hour long taxi ride. As a group they decided to save money and take the taxi. This would have been all well and good, except an avalanche in one of the numerous mountain passes that exist between Osh/Jalalabad and Bishkek completely cut off traffic as well as killing a few Kyrgyz people. Luckily, the only negative consequence for volunteers and counterparts is their absence at the conference (after the avalanche all the airline ticket got bought up very quickly) but it’s scary to think that that could happen to volunteers in transit too.

One of the more “bad ass” stories from this actually comes from one of the counterparts. This Kyrgyz woman, once her taxi came to the edge of the avalanche and was being directed to turn around, decided to leave with all her baggage and make the several hundred meter traverse across the mountain pass on top of the avalanche snow to the other side where she picked up a taxi. This made sure she was the only CP or volunteer from the south that had taken road transport that made it and also severely showed up her volunteer as he has yet to show up. I’m just thankful that none from our group of volunteers and CPs were hurt though.