by Simon Forrester, UNV Programme Officer

03 September 1998

BONN: There's always a special feeling about being the first UNV Specialist from your home country to serve internationally, so it's easy to imagine the pleasure the UNV office in Kazakhstan had in hosting the first UN Volunteers not from one, but two countries. And what's more, the UNV Specialists in question are serving alongside each other on the same project. Dr. Nasser Fadel Saleh is a Community Development Specialist with a doctorate in Economics and he is the first UNV Specialist to represent the Republic of Yemen. From a background at home of serving for two years as a National Project Director on a UNDP initiative to assist the Vocational Rehabilitation for the Disabled and a long academic history at institutions in Moscow, Nasser comes well equipped to Kazakhstan, a former Republic of the Soviet Union, to assist in the community development work of a project entitled "The Economic Advancement of Women in Rural Kazakhstan".

Nasser will be stationed in Kyzylorda Oblast, in the south-east of Kazakhstan, exchanging his role of facilitating community-based activities in Yemen and, incidentally, of supervising the work of four UNV Specialists, to act as a focal point for NGO development and micro-credit disbursal for small entrepreneurial groups of Kazakhstani women. He will be joined in this task not only by a small team of national staff, but also by a second UNV colleague, who also comes to Kazakhstan as a 'first'.

Ms. Kulnara Djamankulova is the first Kyrgyz national to serve internationally as a UNV Specialist, although like Nasser she is no stranger to the UNV Programme. For the last two years, Kulnara has served in the capacity as a National UNV in her home country of Kyrgyzstan, a neighbouring Central Asian state to Kazakhstan. Like Nasser, she is very much a community animator. Yet in her work for the Kyrgyz UNDP Poverty Alleviation Project, Kulnara has also acquired invaluable experience on training in micro-credit and on monitoring activities connected to a successful micro-credit programme. And significantly for her new assignment in Semipalatinsk, the second project site, Kulnara also pursued Gender Studies at the Central European University in Budapest.

Mansiya Kainazarova, the National Project Co-ordinator for the Kazakh project, is delighted that the two new volunteers are first-time representatives of their respective countries, but above all she is impressed with their professional skills: "It's very exciting to work with international volunteers who have such a good understanding of the situation in Kazakhstan, as Nasser and Kulnara do, and who are also fluent Russian speakers !" Being the UNV Programme in Kazakhstan, I can only celebrate this 'double-whammy'. Having met Nasser and Kulnara, all I can say to all their colleagues, friends and country-fellows back home is: "Make your applications to the UNV programme now!"