You could make an incredible road movie based on the drive from Jalalabat (or Jalalabad, the English spelling seems a little indiscriminate) to Osh. Vim Venders would have an great time lingering over the scenery.

In the late Autumn sun, it has the air of an Oriental paradise. Children sit in the fields after school wearing colourful uniforms, young boys herd cattle down the middle of the road, and men in tall felt hats pause by streams before moving on to lazily scythe down corn stalks still standing from the recent harvest.

And always, always there are incredible mountains in the background. Apparently the skiing season is fantastic, so I’m told.

This is no pastoral idyll, though. It’s more like a glimpse of life after the Apocalypse.

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, people here didn’t need to use ox carts to haul corn picked by hand around: they had tractors and combine harvesters. The children were taken to school in buses, rather than walking for miles through fields. Teachers weren’t in such short supply that if a group tried to kidnap a colleague’s daughters for marriage, they’d be hauled off to the gulag rather than tolerated for the sake of keeping fragile, failing communities together.

It seems incredible that we celebrated the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall just a month or so ago. It took less than a generation without law and order for standards of morality – particularly where the standing of women is concerned – to vanish in many rural areas.

Even the warm autumn sun has something of the lie about it. In the winter, the temperature drops to 30 below zero, and people are forced to retreat to the back rooms of their wood and straw shacks, away from the glassless windows and hope that the tin roofs don’t let the snow in.

With no decent housing, no industry to speak of and a low quality of education for the poor, what’s been lost here is knowledge, and it takes a painful toll on all, but especially on women.

Women in the poor districts within towns and villages describe themselves as “scared and shy”, because all they know is to shut up and be subservient to men and their terrifying mothers in law. They accept being kidnapped as a way of life, and would rather families sort out local disputes than dare to try and call the authorities in. In some villages, the nearest police station is 200Km away.

Yet for the women we’ve met, a simple class in rights and advocacy has been enough to grow their confidence enough that they won’t take the beatings any moreme . They’ve struck out on their own, setting up collectives to create and sell handicrafts, keeping Kyrgyz artwork and traditions alive while at the same time making money for themselves. One lady we spoke to laughed about the banks and microfinance institutions she had borrowed from to buy materials and equipment in the past – “They ask why we don’t come any more for another loan, we say we don’t need them! We make more than enough now for all of us.”

Part of me wants to be angry that people have fallen so far and so fast. But I don’t really know what life was like here under communism: no-one mentions the political oppression, disappearances and state interference in life which must have happened. All we hear is that women were respected and had equal opportunity (whatever that meant under the Soviet system) and were represented by women’s councils in every district. I doubt that the Soviet era was as plentiful and liberating as some people have described it, but certainly there were some values which it taught that everyone agrees on.

But it’s impossible to underestimate the shock a society receives when one day they wake up and the government which told them where to work, where to live and how to live has gone. Perhaps, certainly in the poorest areas, the reversion to Lord of the Flies style madness is inevitable, and the new government really did have too many other issues to address – finding money, distributing land and so on – to maintain order.

What’s surprising is that people here have any sense of humanity left at all. But they do, and many of the Kyrgyz customs – particularly when it comes to the treatment of strangers – are overwhelmingly generous. It’s a traditionally tolerant culture and it doesn’t take much to make people see that that tolerance should extend to each other too. One of our Red Crescent guides talked sadly about a ‘lost generation’, but what she showed us was the redeeming power of just a little information in the right place.

It will be years and a lot of money before all of Kyrgyzstan is as beautiful on the inside as it looks from without, but the work has clearly begun.

The mountains. Yesterday.

Just about the only thing I remember reading in a guidebook before coming here was that you shouldn’t, under any circumstances, use the local airlines. They can’t fly to the EU because they don’t have stringent enough safety regulations. Naturally I double checked that the connecting flight from Istanbul was with Turkish Airlines, but completely forgot to ask about the internal shuttle between Bishkek and Osh.

The locals call these planes ‘flying minibuses’, because they’re not entirely dissimilar to the beat up old people carriers used as buses in the towns. It’s anyone’s guess as to how old they are. Judging by the fact they don’t even have seatbelt warning lights, it’s probably a safe bet that the twin propellered machines are hangovers from the Soviet era.

On the plus side, that does mean there are cute retro fittings like curtains, instead of window blinds, and cushioned walls studded with bolts. On the downside, the seats flop around like a badly broken arm, the belts are twisted and trays fall down as soon as the person in front sits back.

Worse, Kyrgyzstan is a beautiful, mountainous country. Each of the three main cities has its unique character and landscape, but they all involve rolling foothills and snow capped peaks. The largest ranges cleave the country in two and form a border with Uzbekistan. Both of which our flying minibuses pass over on the journey between Bishkek and Osh.

That means turbulence. Which they don’t handle well. It also means a great view though.

Fortunately I’ve never been afraid of flying, and actually the planes don’t feel unsafe. I just know that if Tamsin saw them, she’d never let me out of her sight again.

The toys were made by Suyorkan's disabled son.

It’s really not often you meet a Red Crescent Secretary General, two senior members of government, the leader of a prominent local NGO  and visit two impoverished settlements in one, so it’s going to take a while to process everything we’ve taken in today.

The big thing, though, has been the ripple effect of training. Our last meeting was with a lovely lady called Suyorkan, in library number 77, the new settlement of Ak-Orgo on the outskirts of Biskek. A city, which, is poor in a way like no other I’ve ever been to – outside the downtown district it becomes really hard to tell areas apart. No roads are kept in any kind of order, there’s no pavements and the verges are all overgrown. Without looking really hard for tell tale clues in the design of walls and plot gates, you can’t tell whether you’re in a commercial area, an upmarket neighbourhood or a slum from the main roads. In fact, even after you hit the backstreets it’s hard to tell for a while.

Suyorkan’s library, with its wonderfully communist name, is inside the local secondary school. She was a librarian in the Soviet union, but had to give up work in the early nineties to look after her disabled son and, later, her sick husband too. When she wanted to come back to work, she found the only training in essential IT skills was available through the Red Crescent program.

Ironically, although IT course kicked off her journey, there are no computers in her tiny library yet. Just 8,500 books in a room smaller than most classrooms along with a huge card index and some artwork made by her son and his classmates. That will change, though, as she’s just received a $9000 grant from the Soros Foundation to buy some laptops.

Yak farmers outside the library window

I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who possessed something that really falls under the old cliche of ‘steely determination” before, but if Suyorkan doesn’t have it then the meaning escapes me. From her library she helps to organise classes in IT, sewing and hairdressing for other women of her community, as well as first aid classes and classes for teaching disabled children. She also runs a health outreach program for families with disabled children – who have moved to the area from outlying villages at an astonishing rate in the often misguided hope that they’ll be able to get help from the government. Suyorkan helps these families with basic care skills and organising the ludicrous amount of paperwork they need to complete in order to receive benefits.

Suyorkan

The ripple effect is that the woman and children Suyorkan helps then go on to pass their knowledge onto others, or at least  encourage more people to attend training sessions organised by NGOs at the library, when they might not otherwise have heard of them. She’s been branded a troublemaker and urged to give up fighting a system which has the odds stacked against them by her husband, but she keeps on going, and the longer she keeps it up the more visitors arrive at her library to see the things she’s done and help improve on it. Next year, she hopes, she’ll be able to open a second branch in the basement of another nearby school with room for even more books and training classes.