by Volker Pabst

17 August 2006

Volker Pabst of Switzerland is a UNV volunteer human rights specialist with the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in Kazakhstan.

The bus that takes me to work stops just in front of my house at Republic Avenue, the main street of Astana, which is where I’m living since February. Back then, I went cross-country skiing on the frozen Ishim River, the streets were covered with snow and people protected themselves from icy 30-below zero in impressive fur coats. Now, ice and fur are far away. Instead of skis, you’ll see boats on the river and instead of thick coats, mini skirts and sleeveless tops dominate the promenade, as if people had to compensate for the five layers of clothes that the winter season made them wear. Smack in the centre of Eurasian landmass, Astana is perhaps the capital with the world’s largest temperature range throughout the year.

But not only climate has changed since my arrival. The city is being reconstructed at an amazing pace since 1997 when President Nursultan Nazarbayev crowned it the country’s new capital, especially the new town on the left bank where most of the administration and representative buildings are located. I happen to be there once every ten days and I always discover a change in the skyline. More then 200 construction companies are currently doing business in the city and still real state demand is bigger then supply.

I work in the centre of the old town. The UN is steadily increasing its number of employees in Astana and office space is limited. That’s why some of staff is outsourced into government-run places until a larger UN building is found. I happen to share my working place with civil servants that take care of logistical and budget issues of the parliament. The bus takes me there in 15 minutes and the security staff welcomes me with a friendly smile. In a few weeks, the UNDP Human Rights Project and its main partner, the Presidential Commission on Human Rights, is, in cooperation with the UNESCO cluster office in Almaty, going to launch the digital library website project. In Kazakhstan, publication of legal texts is privatized and thus access is not free of charge. Consequently, large parts of the population lack basic information on their rights.

Information dissemination is not an easy task in a country that is the world’s ninth largest in territory, and sparsely populated. However, as a legacy from Soviet times, an extensive network of municipal libraries is spread all over the country and that is what we are going to make use of for our project.

In a joint effort to promote human rights education and access to justice for all, the Presidential Commission on Human Rights, UNDP, UNESCO and UNV are preparing a huge database of human rights related documents that will be accessible via the Internet from any municipal library, even in the remotest areas of the country. Library staff will be trained on the program that runs this tsiffrovaya biblioteka and will thus be able to give professional support to anyone who is looking for information on his or her rights.

As in any project, the timeframe is tight in the last weeks before the deadline and everybody is under strain. The fine-tuning of the Kazakh version of the legal documents is turning out to be time consuming since there are different types of formats for the specific Kazakh letters that are each supported by different software. This additional workload keeps our IT specialist busy and I try to support him by taking care of the Russian documents.

After some 200 pages on prison standards, I take my lunch break and walk to a small square, some 10 minutes from my office. I have a bite in a kulinariya, a traditional kind of fast food place. Moreover, in order to fight the summer heat, I usually get two pints of kvas, a bread based soft drink that I developed a passion for. Back at the office, I finish “Freedom of Belief” and work on a couple of chapters on children’s rights; a task that keeps me occupied the entire afternoon.

Since my break was short, I leave the office a bit early and take the 20 minutes walk to the main UN building. Spending hours in a government building where large parts of the staff are quite cautious when it comes to casual chats with a foreigner can be quite a lonesome undertaking, so I like to visit my colleagues. After a chat, I don’t take the shortest way along Republic Avenue, but I follow the crowded bank of Ishim, which at that time of day, is definitely my favorite place.