April 26

​‘Those mountain summers were wonderful for me’ continues Great Grandmother later in the week. ‘

Equally important, I could stay on at school when we came down from the mountains at summer’s end. You take school for granted. But mine was the first generation of girls in this part of the world to receive more than rudimentary education. In the normal way of life around here I was reaching the age when my father would have been looking for a husband for me. School would have ended. All that changed. There were no men around to take those family decisions. School continued for me and my friends. All talk of marriage was postponed’.
 
‘There was something else that made it a very special time. We had suddenly entered into a women’s world. We were visited by communist party officials from Bishkek and Osh. But they had been caught on the wrong foot by the outbreak of war. They came only to give assurances, false in the early years, that all was going well in the war. Some town elders remained. They still tried to exert a traditional masculine dominance. But they were too confused by what was happening to be able to exert authority.

​ In practice, all the key decisions were being made by women. From being behind the times, we women had suddenly jumped ahead of our time’.