Postcard from Bishkek

Who could possibly confuse Kyrgyzstan with the Ivory Coast?  Why did news reports about the election results in this small West African country strike a chord with me this week?  Could it simply be related to the fact that we have also had a recent election drama or that both countries seem to be divided into North and South – just like the United States had been during their civil war in the nineteenth century?

I have written in other postcards about how many people around the world often don’t know where Kyrgyzstan is – or even that it exists.  Of course, this year’s events have meant that more people have heard about Kyrgyzstan, but even so, there is still a lot of confusion out there.

For example, I know I have told this story many times but when I first told my mother that I was coming to Kyrgyzstan she telephoned a few days later and asked, “Ian, where did you say you were going?”  “To Bishkek,” I replied, “in Kyrgyzstan”.  “Well why can’t I find it on the map?”  I told her where to look, “Find the page with Asia, and find India …”, “Got it!”, now go North from the tip of India, about the same distance further North as the length of India,” but she still couldn’t find it.  “OK, next time I come home I’ll show you, I assured her.”  A couple of weeks later I travelled home to see her and it all became clear.  The reason she couldn’t find Kyrgyzstan was that she was using an old Atlas with the Khirghiz SSR and Bishkek was still called Frunze.  I explained what had happened and she felt happier because she could, at least, point to it on a map.  All the same, I got her a new atlas so that she could show her friends.  I also took her some photographs so she could envisage the place and understood that I wasn’t going to “the back of beyond”.

However, that was only example, and there have been several times since then when I have been confused.  There was a case, a few years ago, when I saw a news report on-line about Central Asia which featured a map of the region.  Why was I confused?, because the map didn’t show Kyrgyzstan.  There was Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and China … but in between, where was Kyrgyzstan?  It was nowhere to be seen.  I wish that I had saved a copy of the map, but at that time I wasn’t so aware of the importance of the issue.  I did dash off a “letter to the editor”, but I never got a reply so I am not even sure if it ever arrived or if anyone really saw it.

Then there was the time when I had had to fill in a form on line, and to make life easy, there was a “drop down” list of countries of the world … but to my amazement, Kyrgyzstan was not on the list.  Kazakhstan was there, but as I scrolled down – no Kyrgyzstan.

Although most of our expenses are in local currency – som – we work with foreign clients, and they obviously don’t want us to quote our prices in som.  They would prefer our prices to be quoted in their local currency or, at least, one in which they can compare us with our competitors.  As a result we tend to quote зкшсуы in either US dollars or Euro.  This causes us a few problems with our accounts which have to be in som for tax purposes.  It’s not a big problem, but it is an issue.  Even though the Kyrgyz Som is a fully convertible currency, very few people can walk into their High Street bank at home and exchange their local currency, Sterling, Dollars (US, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand …), Euro, Euro, Yen or whatever into som.  They probably can’t even find an exchange rate for it on line either – at least, not until recently … I see that oanda.com have now included it in their list currency list.

Back in 2005, I was in London and bought a CD Travel encyclopaedia.  When I got back to Bishkek and inserted into my computer’s CD drive and started looking things up – you can imagine my surprise when I called up the Kyrgyzstan page and was faced with a map of Kenya.  The CD was a mirror of the organization’s website – and for a time the same error was visible on the website … but, I am pleased to say, it has since been corrected.

The Kyrgyzstan page on the wikiglobe.org site has a similar problem.  Here, the main text and the map are OK, but the “quick facts” box and the other links all referred to Tajikistan.

I began to wonder if there was something I had missed.

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A couple of weeks ago we got an enquiry from a potential client.  At first we thought it was a scam … it had many of the telltale signs that implied that it might be a scam except it actually named the client was interested in visiting.  The trouble was that the member of staff dealing with the message didn’t recognize them.  Well, most of them. One of them looked like Andijan – but as Andijan is in Uzbekistan, she asked me what to do.  I looked at the email and realisd straight away what the problem was.  It wasn’t Andijan – it was Abidjan.  The writer wasn’t referring to Central Asia at all – but to the Ivory Coast.

When we checked the atlas – sure enough, there were some of the other cities he had named.

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I was reminded of this incident watching those news reports about the disputed election emerging from Abidjan.

I still don’t know how, or why, we received an enquiry about West Africa – but presumably he had circulated his request to a number of travel companies and our contact details came up on some internet search.  Anyway, we sent back a short but simple reply pointing out that we couldn’t help because we were located in a completely different part of the world … but if he was ever interested in visiting Central Asia, then please feel free to contact us and we would see if we could be of assistance to him.

Who knows – maybe next year ???

Tags: Expat, Kyrgyzstan