A Bridge of Pride

A new bridge in Kochon had brought its residents both joy and relief. Photo: Mercy Corps Tajikistan

When you come to the community of Kochon in the Garm district of Rasht Valley in Tajikistan, you can’t help noticing the creek that divides the community. But it's difficult to imagine, especially in winter, that such an innocent and harmless creek can bring horror to the hearts and minds of the people living here.

Only the big rocks at the bottom of the riverbed and its uneven banks suggest the creek’s hidden potential for danger when the creek becomes a raging torrent as it does during the spring. Those rocks have not appeared by mere chance. Only very powerful forces are capable of bringing such heavy stones downstream from the mountains. Spring is the time when the danger of the creek is fully exposed and brings its many problems to the inhabitants of the community.

For many years Kochon residents had used a small, creaky wooden bridge to cross the creek to visit friends or get to work. Sometimes burial processions used the bridge because the bridge represented the quickest route for community members to access the cemetery. More than 300 children used this bridge to go to school and back. People crossing the bridge called for all imaginable and unimaginable forces to protect them as the condition of the bridge would not give them much confidence that they would be able to cross safely. But they kept using it because there was no other way to cross the creek, and few resources to repair it.

But in 1999, two fatal accidents occurred. In seperate incidents that spring, an 8-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl fell into the roaring waters of the creek. The current and the rocks sealed their doom; they were found dead 300 meters downstream. These tragedies brought a real nightmare to community residents. Fearing for their children’s lives, they faced a dilemma: to continue to risk their children's lives letting them go to school, or keep them safe at home. They chose to send children to school and bounded one teacher to watch the children until they safely crossed the creek.

It's no surprise, then, that when Mercy Corps' Community Action Investment Program (CAIP) team came to this community and helped organize a community workshop on how to solve community problems, people identified a new bridge as their number-one priority.

The USAID-funded Community Action Investment Program (CAIP) is a three-year, $9.8 million project that addresses social instability and aims to alleviate potential sources conflict in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and in the Ferghana Valley area of Uzbekistan. The project focuses on promoting dialogue, improving standards of living and facilitating stronger cooperation among communities and local government.

Reconstruction on the bridge began in November 2002 and was completed in December. Now when they look at the bridge, residents feel joy and pride - joy because it means an end to their nightmare, and pride because they managed to build this bridge themselves.

Of course there were financial contributions from Mercy Corps’ CAIP program. But the hard work was accomplished by the residents. They dug holes for bridge support and pulled from the bottom of the creek heavy stones to strengthen the banks of the creek and protect the bridge itself from impending floods. The children of the community pitched in, too, knowing that from now on they can face the dreadful current of the creek and with little fear of being swept away.