Conwy to Baku

A portion of the funds raised so far towards “Baku or Bust” have made their first contribution. On Saturday the charity Gôl did a bank transfer of $1000 to help build a kitchen at the Saray orphanage in the city of Sumqayit, Azerbaijan. We will be shown progress when we visit in June.

The project will entail creating a kitchen where the mentally and physically challenged orphans will learn how to help themselves and help others in the institution of the orphanage Saray, which houses approximately 200 such youth and children of both genders. Presently they do not have any access to a kitchen so are unable to supplement their very poor diet, they do not have a place to learn ergonomical skills such as feeding themselves or even preparing a nutritious fruit salad or ordinary salad. Additionally this place will be used to make play-doh and similar things which help those completely bedridden children to improve their motoric skills. It will also serve as an informal meeting point where they can prepare a meal together and have it together in a civilised and welcoming atmosphere. This kitchen focal point will help inculcate skills of caring for each other and for themselves.  The time for this project in terms of setting up the kitchen will take 2 months and the project itself could continue for at least 1 year and one can reassess it after that.

Sumqayit is often (always) amongst lists of “Top 10 Most polluted cities on earth”, and often ahead of a city which has had a nuclear meltdown, Chernobyl. In 2007 it made #1 of the Blacksmith Institutes list; full list here.

The orphanage, which has 22 rooms (sleeping 8 to a room), was built in 1974 after concerns about the high number of children being born with conditions like cerebral palsy, spina bifida and Down’s sydrome. Most of the children are from the nearby town of Sumqayit, which stands on the shores of the Caspian Sea. Sumqayit was once the biggest petro-chemical centre in the Soviet Union. It was built on the orders of Stalin in the 1930s and increased from a population of just 6,000 to around 350,000. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the country’s independence in 1991 opened Sumqayit to the outside world and environmentalists revealed the high levels of pollution. In 1992, the government of Azerbaijan declared Sumqayit “an ecological disaster zone”.  The World Health Organisation has tried to establish a more definite link between the pollution levels and the health of people living in Sumqayit. One report estimated there were 200,000 tonnes of “mercury sludge” dumped around Sumqayit. Source: Azerbaijans Poisoned Legacy, http://www.nigelgreenmedia.com/