Saturday, February 9, 2008
Crisis Looms as Bitter Cold, Blackouts Hit Tajikistan
The lights have gone out in most of Tajikistan, the poorest republic in the former Soviet Union.
The country is facing an energy crisis in the midst of the coldest winter in more than 25 years.
With millions of people left without electricity, heat or running water, aid organizations are warning of a growing humanitarian crisis.
For the past 15 days, there has been no heat, electricity or running water in the freezing maternity ward of a small country hospital in the Tajik capital, Dushanbe.
In that time, Adolat Shoreva and her small team of nurses have helped deliver 13 babies -- by candlelight.
"In my 40 years as a nurse, I've never seen it this bad," Shoreva says. "I sit in the dark at night and cry."
The unusually cold winter has overwhelmed the country's aging Soviet-era infrastructure, leaving millions of people cold, in the dark, without access to clean water.
Aid workers say that even before this crisis, more than 60 percent of the population was living below the poverty line...
Millions (plural) below the poverty line, in the dark, without good water. Yet I wonder how much international aid and attention they get compared to...other places...who receive more aid and attention and whose suffering isn't the product of nature, but of their own war of choice.
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