The Dostuk Experience

I already mentioned that my office is dealing with the issue of the lack of adequate housing in Kyrgyzstan.

In this context, we organized a 2-days workshop with National and Local Istitutions and NGOs to present the Reports drafted by national experts. These Reports cover Russian Federation, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and deal with the national situation on adequate housing and forced eviction.

Location for the event: Dostuk Hotel, located in Frunze str. (Frunze was the soviet name for Bishkek), not far from the City Center.

Dostuk Hotel, as you can see from pics and description, is a huge, monumental and rocky building with 183 rooms, conference rooms and many other facilities sadly abandoned to dust and darkness.

The "Conference Holl" (Yes, this is the way it was written on the door) wasn't exactly an auditorium but a big dining hall with heavy curtains to keep out daylight and big kitsch overhead lights spreading yellow light all over the room. As factotum I also had to take pictures of the event, and I struggled all time with that damned light... I think I will photoshop some pic where the evil yellow light won the day.

Boymurod, our colleague from OHCHR Office in Dushanbe (Tajikistan), was also here for he directly supervised the Report on Tajikistan. He was supposed to stay in Dostuk as all other participants but, upon his arrival at the reception he was told that apparently his reservation was lost somehow, and they didn't have any other room to assign to him.

Now, Bishkek is not the top-destination in the world for tourism, march is usually low season and this hotel pretends to have 183 rooms for his guests.

I am not a CIA expert, but in my opinion the overall situation sounds weird.

After this denial he moved to another Guesthouse for the night, but the day after he had to be back to the Dostuk because they lost the reservation for the first day but they had firm in front of them the one for the second, and it was too late to cancel it.

When he came back to the Dostuk on the second day of the seminar, before the beginning of the works, he decided to check in and end up this annoying situation. But, when he entered the room he was assigned to he started walking in a swamp; one of the heating pipes was broken, and the floor was full of water. The desk, after asking him about any kind of responsibility of involvement in the fact from his side, unwillingly decided to give him a second key for another room.

Boymorod went up the stairs. He opened the door, saw happily that there was no water on the floor, but left the room in a rush when he discovered that there was someone sleeping in "his" bed.

At the desk they blamed him for not checking if the room was empty or occupied. I admit it is not so easy to reply to such a nonsensical accusation, so I understand why he didn't decide to just start yelling at them.

He just wearily took the third key of the day and went back to the elevator trying not to think about what was going to happen with this other room.

He reached the floor, walked the hallway looking all along to identify the right number. He stood in front of the right door, dumbly observing it in the useless effort to catch any potential sign witnessing the presence of someone into his room. When he finally decided that the only way to see if his deduction was right was to enter the flat, he inserted the keys and... nothing happened.

The locker was broken.

When we told this story to other delegates, they laughed more than usual. They explained us that probably he would have had some other surprise later on that night; the first night, all (male) delegates received phone calls in their room at around midnight. Someone was asking them about their intention to receive a "special massage" generously performed by two (or more) girls.

The one who weren't lucid or just awake enough for refusing, had the above mentioned girls in front of their door in no more than 5 minutes.

At least, they cannot argue about the services offered during OHCHR's workshops...