Lightbulbs Brighten Tajik Village

by Umed Kharimov

Many Tajiks have fled urban poverty and civil war by returning to their ancestral homelands in the Pamir Mountains. The once uninhabited mountains have experienced the rebirth of the kishlak (Tajik for "small mountain village").

Since Tajikistan's independence, these rural areas have also experienced an energy crisis. Previously Tajikistan received coal from Kazakstan, Russia and Ukraine, but these supplies were cut off after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Without coal to heat their homes and prepare food, rural Tajiks began cutting trees to burn for energy. In the past three years, rapid deforestation has exposed mountain slopes to erosion and landslides and threatened the very existence of rare ecosystems in national parks. Such is the case in the Shirkent National Park, located 100 kilometers east of Dushanbe on the western edge of the Pamirs.

Recognizing the region's energy needs, an ecology school for university and secondary school students organized in 1992 by the American organization Service Adventures, in cooperation with the Tajik Small Academy of Science, chose to address the situation. The school purchased a micro hydroelectric station and transported it by helicopter from St. Petersburg to the Shirkent National Park. Its destination, the village of Pashmi Kukhna, is a village of 10 families located 2,000 meters above sea level, where the winter lasts from October through May.

Together with the villagers, representatives from Service Adventures and the Tajik Small Academy of Science conducted a trial of the micro hydroelectric station, which was to provide electricity and heating to residents. Constrained by time, lack of construction materials and the advance of civil war, the project came to a halt.

In 1996, with the support of an ISAR grant, Energetik, a Tajik NGO dedicated to protecting the environment through creating and implementing environmentally friendly energy sources, completed construction of the micro hydroelectric station.

Much work remains to be done before all the project goals are met, but for the first time in the history of Pashmi Kukhna there are electric lights in the huts of the village. While the station is not yet powerful enough to supply all the homes in the area with the power needed to heat their homes through the winter, the cutting of trees on park lands has decreased. When the first lights began to glow in the station itself, 500 meters from the huts of the village, a child who had never seen electric light before exclaimed, "The stars have fallen to the earth."

Umed Kharimov is director of Energetik. Translated by Andrew Yim. Energetik, 3 Akademicheskaya Street, Apartment 13, Dushanbe 734063, Tajikistan; phone: (3772) 27-76-78; e-mail: umeda@glas.apc.org