My first press conference in Central Asia was all about poo 

A few days after I started work I’m sent to my first press conference in Bishkek, all about waste water in Kyrgyzstan. 

The press conference is being given by John E. Johnson, a scientist from the US Environmental Protection Agency, who has just completed a study of Kyrgyzstan’s drinking water supplies. 

Johnson stands at the front of the small conference room, under a banner saying ‘AkiPress’ in English and Russian. The journalists, most of them Kyrgyz women, sit opposite him, pens and notebooks poised. 

He tells us about Kyrgyzstan’s run-down infrastructure. Water supplies aren’t purified property, and sewage is inadequately treated before being allowed to flow into streams and rivers that are used for drinking water. Waste water pipes are broken, leaking their contents into the water table, but there’s not enough money to repair them. 

Why there’s no money

Twelve years ago, when the Soviet Union disintegrated, the markets for most of Kyrgyzstan’s produce disappeared overnight. The idea, batted about in the mid-90s by optimistic government ministers and international donors, that Kyrgyzstan would become ‘the Switzerland of Central Asia’, died when the Russian economy crashed in 1998, and the country is only just emerging from a long recession. 

Unlike its luckier neighbours, Kyrgyzstan has very little oil or gas, and there simply isn’t a lot of money about. You can see it in the cracked pavements, the broken down cars, the beggars in the underpass outside TSUM. It’s no surprise that they can’t afford to maintain the water systems properly.  

I learn that the people living in the little bungalows, like Frunze’s old house, that made up much of Bishkek’s housing get their water from standpipes going down about six metres to the groundwater. Many of these are only metres away from an “unlined pit toilet”. (I’m not perfectly sure what an unlined pit toilet is, but it doesn’t sound very nice.) 

Toxic leaks

Outside the big cities, sewage from apartment blocks flows into cesspits which invariably leak. 

“I saw children outside those apartment blocks playing with raw sewage,” says Johnson. “With my own eyes.”

There have been a few high-profile environmental disasters concerning water in Kyrgyzstan that attracted international attention. The lorry-load of sodium cyanide on its way to the Kumtor gold mine that fell into the Barskoon River and flowed from there into Lake Issyk-Kul, was one of these. The leaking uranium dumps at Mayluu-Su in southern Kyrgyzstan are another. But poorly treated drinking water is just as much of a threat to people’s health.

Poor condition

“Almost all the water supply networks inspected were in poor condition, and some needed to be completely replaced,” Johnson continues. 

“This is due to a severe shortage of funds in the 12 years since independence, causing a reduction of experienced staff, a reduction in water quality monitoring, and a reduction in the routine maintenance of equipment.” 

The fact that a lot of businesses and households are months behind with their water bills doesn’t help.

Water quality in Kyrgyzstan is a ‘postcode lottery’. In some areas surface water from rivers and snow melt is only filtered but not treated, while in other areas it is passed through proper settling systems or treated with chlorine. 

Risk of infection

“For surface water supply systems without treatment there is a very high risk of viral and bacterial infections,” says Johnson.

The journalists all want to know about the water quality in Bishkek, are relieved to hear that it is extremely safe. Of course. This is where the high government officials, the managers of the water board and the rich business people live. 

But not everywhere. The plumbing system in our building decides to prove Johnson’s point about the problems in the country. When my colleague and I go down to the café in the basement for our lunch we find the floor awash with water.