If the main bridge across the Rhone River in central Geneva collapsed and was not repaired, or attended to within days, or even hours, residents of the Swiss city would be up in arms, lobbying and harassing local, regional or federal authorities to act. Action would likely soon be taken.
What would happen in a small southwestern Tajikistan town, 12 kilometres from the biggest centre in the Khatlon region?
In Kahrman, near the country's third largest city of Qurghonteppa (formerly Kurgan-Tyube) nothing happened for weeks when the residents' bridge collapsed during flooding a year ago. People seemed paralysed. They just did not know what to do.
"People could not move their crops, nor could they access the nearby village where some worked," said school teacher Ruziev Habinjan, who also does a little farming, like many of his neighbours. "When they decided to form a self-help group, it was then they began to find a solution." The self-help group raised its own funds, and then lobbied government authorities to repair their vital artery. The combined effort, along with a dash of international aid, got the bridge up again.
An obvious solution, many Westerners might say. But not so obvious in the former Soviet Central Asian republics, such as Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.
Tajikistan was the poorest of the Soviet republics and remains one of the world's very poor countries. Yet, in those countries, church-backed aid and development groups are supporting the nurturing of a new basic pillar in societies left floundering after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.
Ecumenical News International spent two weeks with researchers monitoring and analysing self-help groups, which can often be the only means of making possible the arrival of the most basic civil amenities, like water, the allocation of arable land, and functioning roads in a global region that seems unknown outside it own realm.
Behind them is the Ecumenical Consortium for Central Asia is made up of Britain-based Christian Aid, DanChurchAid from Denmark, the Dutch Interchurch Organisation for Development Co-operation (ICCO) and Norwegian Church Aid.
This group has made the development of what is now called "civil society", a priority. So, these Christian organisations are pumping in resources, and working along with other NGOs and international organisations, with the humbly named "self-help group" a high item on their agenda in a milieu that is now predominantly Islamic.
"The SHGs," as they are known, "are promoted to mobilise communities with involvement of non governmental organisations, religious organisations and local authorities. The SHGs enable communities to solve their own problems," says Shahriyor Ibrgimov, programme manager of Development and Cooperation in Central Asia which works with ECCA, speaking in Osh, the second largest Kyrgyzstan city.
A sign of how ignored Central Asia is in the rest of the world, is that international television stations beamed into the region, such as Al Jazeera, the BBC, CNN, China Central Television and Islam Television, do not display the capital cities of the area on screen in their global weather forecasts.
Central Asia may conjure up images of the Old Silk Road that linked West with East in the days before even sailing ships opened up the sea routes during the pre-Medieval process of globalisation.
