The World Bank announced at the beginning of February, that they would support the building of civil society in Uzbekistan. This is the good news. The more tricky one is that the implementing partner is …

As Registan.net draws attention to an article in the euobserver, it seems Central Asia is rather high on the agenda of the EU. There is just a problem: We do not hear anything about it.
Central …

2006 was a grim year for international and national NGOs in Uzbekistan. 2007 starts well on paper but in reality the pressure continues.

During the last few weeks, a number of international NGOs have been closed or been threatened of closure in Uzbekistan. Since the end of April this year, the speed of closures seems to have …

Today the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will visit Tashkent. He will stop by on his way from Germany to India (Interesting Article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). It is illustrating, that the Indian Primeminster …

You notice right away that Uzbekistan is a “young” country. Children are all over the place. Some claim that up to 45% of the population is under 15 years of age (UNDP human development report 2004. Chidren are everywhere and in many cases one only notices them when children live on the streets, work on the markets or beg you for money. But they also play, have fun and can get on your nerves pretty much if you don’t take your time to understand them.

In Samarkand I started thinking about a way to take pictures of children who play on the street, without having to ask them. At some point I figured out a good way which is actually exremely simple. You just have to take out the camera and take pictures of something. If there are kids around, they will spot you and ask you to photograph them. Funny thing is. They do pretty much the same things I did when I was a kid and somone took a picture of me. These are details like the donkey or rabbit ears (the V-sign with your hand behind the head of your friend) and that children like to be either completely cool or dead serious.

Well, the photos are staged but still show a lot of the way the kids see themselves:

On 8 January 2006 a fire destroyed the Chorog orphanage for intellectually disabled children in Gorki Street in Dushanbe. 13 children were killed in the blaze. The children who have survived were moved to a …