Shovels, please.

Any international development professionals or just good ole fashioned humanitarians out there who want to put together a project to deliver a whole bunch of snow shovels to the government of Kyrgyzstan? Your help would be greatly appreciated. Let me explain.

I've got my gripes about daily life in Kyrgyzstan (burning garbage, absence of street signs, inattentive waitresses, etc.), and don't really like to voice them--above parentheses notwithstanding--but hey what is the point of having a website if you can't vent every now and then, right?

Today's gripe:

While certainly I thought it was a little weird that nobody shovels snow from their driveways, sidewalks, or parking lots here, I didn't have any major reason to be grumpy about it... until today... when I had a near paralyzing experience, slipping cartoon-style on some icy steps cracking my back and head, then proceeding to slide down the remaining steps landing in a cold, dirty puddle. Painful and a tad humiliating. One passerby did stop to see if I was okay. She was kind, but her comment, "I can't believe they didn't shovel these steps," was pretty absurd considering the situation--as far as the eye could see, there was not an inch of snow or ice that had been removed from the sidewalks. Of course I am upset about my sore back and wet pants, but the real losers here are the elderly, who must be breaking hips left and right.

And it's not like the country is completely opposed to the idea of public works. While I don't exactly know what I think about the policy, here grade-schoolers are sent out every saturday to sweep the streets in their school's neighborhood. Couldn't we just replace their brooms with shovels?

(note to anti-child labor advocacy groups: that was sarcasm)