Kazak family no longer nameless

 

    Muhammad, the man in the photo, is the patriarch of the family that lives in Chilik. Living with him are his daughter and three grandchildren. He is suffering from tuberculosis and his daughter, who is a single parent, is unemployed. She has two school-going kids and so has to do odd-jobs to pay the school fees. What makes their plight worse was the fact that they were a ‘no-body’ in Chilik or, for that matter, Kazakstan. They had no documents: no passport, no identification papers. He had lost them many years ago. And so they could not even apply for government grants and assistance.

 

    When we found out about them we decided to help. We  included them in our feeding program and we also embarked on a mission to replace his documents. It is not uncommon for this process to take up to two years and cost a few hundred dollars. In this case, the documents were replaced within two weeks, and we spent only $50 USD.